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[ "The Federal Reserve is essentially a government agency that is operated privately. It was created by the government, it's leaders are appointed by the government, but it is independent. This is often referred to as being \"independent within the government.\" \n\nBy making it independent and quasi-private, the Federal Reserve can run monetary policy more efficiently, without every single thing being politicized and subject to constant interference and squabbling from politicians. This isn't to say that there's no oversight, just that it's less silly." ]

[ "Hats have been popular articles of men's attire from ancient times until 1960. Most men throughout history wore a cap or hat whenever they went outside.\n\nIn 1960, President-Elect Kennedy attended his inaguration hatless and thereafter fashion changed rapidly to dispense with headgear except as environmental conditions required.\n\nFrom about 1920 to 1960 men found it increasingly hard to use hats as an article of fashion due to the headroom in cars. As the headroom got smaller, hats got harder to wear. First the large tophat style hats vanished, then even smaller fedoras. About the only place men still feel comfortable wearing headgear in transport is in the cab of large trucks.", "Yes, this question has almost everything to do with transportation modes. As walking and public transport became the modes for the poor, rich people stopped wearing hats because they are not really needed when you drive your own car.", "There's some fashion documentaries which are pretty interesting. _URL_0_\n\nBasically fashion used to be very rigid and unrelaxed but historical figures through history have relaxed fashion and the hat took off with it. The tie is also on its way out as you see people like Mark Cuban not wearing ties." ]

[ "The Verizon employees who are on strike have not had a contract since August of 2015. Negotiations with the company have not produced the results they felt were appropriate and they have elected to strike based on that.\n\nSome of the issues they have raised are wages, pension freezes, Verizon working to make it easier to dismiss staff and move jobs overseas, among other things.", "They are also striking in protest of talk that Verizon wants to outsource a lot of their jobs to other countries. Big companies love outsourcing because they can tap into foreign, cheaper labor. On one hand, the foreign companies appreciate the jobs, on the other, they are usually vastly underpaid, and foreign intervention makes their economy more unstable. All around bad news for the current American employees." ]

[ "First, texture has a lot to do with food. The sensations of chewing, moving food around in your mouth, and taking a bite-sized solid piece of omelet versus a fluffy bit of scrambled egg with a lot of air in it will add to a difference in flavor.\n\nNext, your omelet usually has a big chunk of \"other stuff\" in its middle whereas the scrambled egg approach would have little bits of other things all throughout them (assuming you are making them with more than just cheese). This changes the way those additional bits cook and exchange tastes with each other, changes their moisture content, and changes the distribution of flavours that you get in each mouthful.\n\nFinally, scrambled eggs are mixed around and they're cooked very uniformly without a \"browned\" exterior, but omelets usually have a little more deep-cooking in their exterior surface, and its different more-burned chemicals can result in a different flavor profile." ]

[ "Right now the parties are voting to pick who they want to run for president, as private entities. They may want to exclude non-party members, for instance to avoid letting 'guerilla voters' bump up a cataclysmically bad candidate so that the party will nominate him/her, and then lose in the general election.\n\nYou aren't currently voting *for president.* When that time comes, you can vote for whoever you'd like.", "Primaries are completely the party's jurisdiction. The party decides how to do it, technically they don't have to hold a primary at all. Different states run their primaries differently, but in a closed primary like yours you have to be registered with that party for your vote to be valid.", "Completely depends on local laws. Because the primary election is run by the parties to choose their candidate, they set their own rules on who can vote. Some places allow anyone, some places you're only allowed to vote in one if you're not voting in the other, some of them you must be a member of the party whose primary you want to vote in.", "Presidential primaries are not part of gov't, they are two private parties choosing which candidate they like the best.\n\nIf you aren't part of the party, they aren't really interested in your opinion." ]

[ "We want cereal to stay crisp, because we don't intend to cook it before eating it. And because it has loads of rough surface area, it absorbs humidity fast.", "Concise_Pirate's answer is the main one. But also some of the cereal tends to get smashed during transport; you'll always have some dust at the bottom of the bag. With a bag it all stays collected and can't sprinkle out through holes in the corners of the box." ]

[ "No, mandarin and cantonese are not phonetic. If you can't figure out the word, you have to look it up or use context.", "They're logograms (sort of), like hieroglyphs. But yeah, there's often much, much less phonetic information \"given\" in a character than you'd get with an English or Korean word. Some words you can guess at their pronunciation, like 羊 (sheep) is pronounced yáng, and 洋 (ocean) and 氧 (oxygen) are pronounced yáng and yǎng respectively. The incorporation of the 羊 is supposed to be a \"hint\" as to how the pronunciation goes, but it doesn't indicate tone.\n\nBut mostly, characters are learned through the system I just showed you: pinyin. That's also how most people type in Chinese, btw. It's a romanized alphabet, using a lot of the letters we use in English, and a couple we don't like ü. Then, you indicate the tone of the word with one of four accent markers, which goes over a specific vowel.", "If you are talking about standard written chinese, simplified and traditional, no because the characters represent ideas as opposed to sounds, however you can transcribe the sounds of the various languages and dialects using pīnyīn or other romanisation systems.\n\nAlso the Chinese characters are ideographic.", "[Pinyin](_URL_1_)\n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt is possible to transcribe the sounds of Chinese characters in a way that those familiar with the Latin Alphabet can make sense of. However, as others have correctly pointed out, there is no way to \"sound out\" an unknown character." ]

[ "You can't really ask the government to just let you take existing but currently uninhabited homes like that, it'd basically amount to stealing from the owner.\n\nSome places have laws about letting property be considered properly 'abandoned' in which case any supposed owner that fails to maintain the property can lose it to someone that does, but that's not universal or necessarily easy.\n\nIgnoring that, though, where are these empty houses? A lot of them are somewhere pretty useless for a homeless person. Having a home doesn't mean much if you can't get a job in the area to hold down the home. Just giving homes to homeless people and calling it a day won't really work - you have to address the fact that most homeless people are facing issues of which being homeless is more of a symptom than a direct problem. Mental health issues, disability, inability to get work, etc." ]

[ "Songs are protected by copyright which protects the song from people copying it. Food on the other hand is a product that is composed of ingredients that are most likely not under patent protection. Also many of the generic brands you mention are actually made by the same company they are trying to imitate. The company just makes a lesser quality version of the name brand for stores to sell as a cheaper version." ]

[ "They use a radar gun, just like (well, in principle) the ones police use. They use the doppler effect to measure speed of the ball. You can buy one at many sporting goods stores.", "A laser is projected at the ball and the delay before it is reflected back is measured. Compare any two data points and you have velocity." ]

[ "Biological drive to reproduce, and societal drive to pass on a family legacy. It's basically that simple." ]

[ "It means \"actual\" in the sense that the thing is a permanent part of the world, as opposed to \"personal estate\" or \"personal property\" which comes an goes.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nYes that's not how we use the word \"real\" usually today, but it was a long time ago.", "Correct me if I'm wrong, but personal property is items not nailed down to the structure, real property is the structure.", "Real Estate, (probably) originally from the difference between the Entitlement (i.e. being declared Lord Bitobear of Landsdown) and the estate itself (i.e. \"Landsdown\" and the houses and crops thereof).\n\nThere's also \"Real Property\", which includes real estate as a sub component, but also includes all my stuff from computers to stock certificates.\n\nWe now have \"intellectual property\" which is, by definition, _not_ \"real\" property.\n\nThe definitions get really persnickety. For instance if I buy a computer, it's real property as a possession. If I mount it in a rack, it's still real property. If I bolt the rack to the floor of my house because I intend rack and computer to be there \"permanently\" the rack becomes reale state and so does the computer that is \"permanently\" installed.\n\nBut if I do exactly the same thing, but I know when I have it bolted in, that it's only going to be there for two weeks, it _doesn't_ become real estate. Why? Because of intent. If I intend the installation to be temporary then the bolts are just safety or convenience.\n\nSo as with most of the law, what something is _and_ why it is, determines which \"kind of thing it is\".\n\nThe distinctions rarely matter until someone complains. Let's say that I leave all my real estate to my daughter and all my fine art to my son. If there's a painting hanging on the wall by a nail is it real estate? (probably not.) But if I built a special frame for a couple of paintings right into the walls of the house and then bolted the frames closed around the paintings then maybe it is. And if it is, it remains part of the real estate even if it's been temporarily taken down for cleaning or maintenance.\n\nAnd what I call out first, and whether I use words like \"remaining\", come into play.\n\nSo the real reason you _always_ need a lawyer is that the tune that all these words dance to is both simple and endlessly subtle.\n\nSo sometimes there's a distinction that makes no difference, and sometimes there's a difference that makes distinctions obvious. \n\nIn general you've got your land, your stuff, your rights (copyright, reciprocal licenses, contracts promised to you), your grants of title (fuzzy ownership stuff), and finally whatever _else_ you can convince the court you have.\n\nWhen I was learning this stuff (second-hand, this is not my S.M.E.) it was what I called \"precisely vague\"... but since I am not a lawyer, take that as a layman's translation.\n\nIf you google \"real estate versus other types\" you'll see that \"real estate\" is put across from all sorts of things.\n\nStick with \"if you can touch it, maybe with a stick, and it's supposed to be peppermint\" then it it's real estate." ]

[ "You could have some degree of face blindness, _URL_0_\n\nWhich is an issue remembering people by their faces. In person, other cues like their voice, stride, context of meeting, and personality will clue you in, but there is no such benefit from photos." ]

[ "I think the best way to describe tides is simply with a visual...\n[_URL_0_](_URL_0_)", "Gravity. Mass of the moon attracts the oceans towards it, raising and lowering the water level as it rotates the earth." ]

[ "For the same reason oral sex is not called throat sex.", "Knowledge is knowing the difference between the anus & the rectum. Wisdom is not caring that people are going to constantly get them confused." ]

[ "I'm guessing it has to do with teeth. Before babies have teeth, there's less surface area for bad breath causing bacteria to cling to, hence no morning breath. Being on a liquid diet probably has something to do with it too." ]

[ "Basically, grain foods are made from cereals, like wheats. The part we eat is the ground up seeds.\n\nRefined grains have the bran and germ removed from it. These are extra parts of the seed that protect it and allow it to grow into a new plant. The only part left is called the 'endosperm' -- it's just the simple carbs put there by the wheat plant to help the seed grow. It's basically the food the seed will later use to germinate.\n\n\"Whole grain\" hasn't been refined. Everything gets ground up together. That's what makes it darker.\n\nThe reason whole grain is beneficial is that the refinement process removes fiber and nutrients from the grain. This in turn leads to the refined grain being closer to just empty calories and also leads to it absorbing much more quickly.\n\nQuick absorption in this case is unfortunate. It means the body gets shocked with sugars (which the refined wheat is mostly turned into in the body) more quickly. In other words, it has a higher glycemic index." ]

[ "Like your five, sans wiki: \n\n**The UPC**: Your basic UPC Bar Code is literally a *code* using vertical lines that represent numbers, letters, etc., the scanner scans horizontally across them in the same way that your eyes read the words on a page, only much, much faster; because of this, the bar code itself can be any height, but they like to make them nice and big to make them scan easier.\n\n(Bonus, like you're 15: it works much in the same way that Morse Code works, only instead of long/short it's a combination of thick/thin/white/black)\n\n**The Scanner**: The codes work because there are \"start\" and an \"end\" codes (and sometimes a \"middle\" as well) that tells it which way to read -- this means they work even if they're upside down (because the laser goes back and forth, it reads right-to-left and left-to-right, and it needs to know where to start).\n\nMost scanners just have a back-and-forth laser, which means you have to orient either the item or the scanner to match (which is why you see people with the hand-held scanners turning every which way, trying to get it to scan) -- newer ones have a more complex pattern that scans at various angles, to ensure that no matter how it's placed in front of the laser, it'll scan it correctly across the bars.", "TIL wikipedia has articles about things\n\nexample:\n\n[Barcodes](_URL_0_) and [UPCs](_URL_2_) and [Barcode Readers](_URL_0__reader)" ]

[ "Evolutionarily, our whole purpose in life is to live long enough to raise children, our genes don’t really care what happens after that. Our entire pain/reward system has been tweaked to this purpose. You ate? Good job, here is some dopamine. You skinned your knee? Bad job, that could get infected and kill you have some pain. \n\n\nBased on this logic, pretty much the worst thing you could do is damage your ability to reproduce, so your balls are absolutely packed with nerve endings that will send intense pain signals to your brain if they sense injury, because losing your reproductive ability is equally as bad as death.", "Because you are hitting an exposed organ that is virtually outside of the body. I'm sure getting hit directly on any other organ would hurt just as much if not more.", "Things that don't reproduce die out, so the species that exist today are species that are good at reproduction, by process of elimination. Natural selection has selected for \"being good at making more yous.\" \n\nIf your balls get ruined, you can't make more yous. If it was easy to get to the point where you couldn't make more yous, you probably wouldn't exist by now, or not exist for much longer. So the body is *very* adverse to ball damage.\n\nI might go so far as to say all of human civilization, art, and science, is a fancy carrying case for sperm." ]

[ "Most everything has chemical reactions as they age. Some medications get weaker so the medicine simply stops working correctly. Some become more powerful so you risk overdose. And some completely change and can either lose their effect or become toxic.", "They don't become unsafe for consumption at their expiration date, that is just the date at which they're guaranteed that they haven't degraded in terms of potency... you could take Tylenol that's a year expired and it's safe, but might only be 90% as effective.", "Medicines are usually organic materials which break down over time and when stored at high temperatures they break down even faster.\nThey don’t become unsafe, the active ingredient just gets less and less so they no longer serve the purpose for which they were created", "So, this is why my doctor has me store my bi-polar/manic medication in the freezer - it's just for emergencies and might not be taken for years." ]

[ "Pretend you have a room full of chalk boards, and you use the chalk boards to keep track of all your important info. You have so many chalk boards that you have a hard time keeping track of them all, and you keep forgetting which chalk board has your shopping list, and which chalk board has your tax records.\n\nTo keep track of your chalk boards, you number them, 1, 2, 3, etc. You also decide to use chalkboard 1 to keep track of what is written on the other chalk boards. Now, when you want to find your shopping list, you check chalk board 1, and it tells you that your shopping list is on board 35.\n\nNow that you have gone shopping, you no longer need your shopping list, so you can delete it. You could go all the way back to board 35 and erase it, but that chalk board is all the way over there, like tens of feet away. That is far, and you are lazy. Easier to just cross out the line on board 1 that says where your shopping list is. Now, if you need to find a board to write on, you can look at board 1, and find a board that has information you no longer need. For example, the line for board 35 is crossed out, which means you can go there and overwrite whatever is there.\n\nMoving a file to the recycling bin is like crossing out a line on board 1. You can see what is/\"was\" written there, but it is marked as trash or recycling by being crossed out. Emptying the recycling is just erasing the crossed out lines.", "The computer (the operating system) keeps a list (index) of the files, the name and the location on the disk. When you \"delete\" the file, the computer marks that entry as no-longer-needed. It doesn't delete the entry, nor does it alter the actual file at all.\n\nNext time it needs to store something on the disk, it looks for available space; if it find an entry that says \"deleted\", it will overwrite the entry and overwrite as much of the file space as it needs.\n\nThe recycle bin is simply another \"list\" that points back to all the files that say \"deleted\" in the real file list. When you \"empty\" the recycle bin, you're deleting this extra list, but not changing anything in the real list. \n\nFor bonus complexity: disk space is assigned in \"clusters\". A file that takes only 100 bytes will actually take (perhaps) 4,000 bytes on the disk. But the computer will only actually write the first 100 bytes - the other 3900 byes will still be the original, deleted, file.", "Pretend you are Amazon, with warehouses full of stuff you sell. Word comes down that a children's toy you sell contains plutonium, and you need to pull it.\n\nYou could spend days hunting through all the shelf looking for them. Or you could just take the item off your website so no one can buy them any more, then get rid of them at your leisure.\n\nThat's pretty much what the computer is doing. It takes the file off the \"in use\" list, and put it on the \"to be recycled\" list. The file itself doesn't change. Then when you empty the recycle bin, it puts it on a \"ok to throw out list\", and will give the files space to someone else as needed.", "When the computer writes files to the disk its like a giant steamroller coming through, crushing the old data, and reorganizing it the way it wants. It looks for any 'unallocated' space to do this. The list of files you have on your computer (in windows explorer) is allocated space and the steamroller is not allowed to use it when told to write a new file.\n\nPushing it to the recycling bin simply removes it from your file list, but NOT from the allocated space. This lets you keep things organized without officially wiping out that data. Internally it is still committed to keeping all of that file data intact until you officially tell it 'empty recycle bin'.\n\nIt is still considered allocated space, which protects it from the steamroller. The intent is to let you return to the recycling bin at a later time, in case you accidentally deleted something and still want it back. If it considered it unallocated space, the steamroller could just crush that space into another file, which would make it useless to you if you wanted to recover the old file. So, it doesn't, and keeps it protected until you want to officially wipe it out.\n\nWhen you say 'empty recycle bin', now you're officially dropping that section of the disk into the bin of 'unallocated space' which the steamroller could come through and smash up at any time.\n\nNote that it doesn't bother going through wiping out the data (like turning all the bits to 0's). It just makes that space available to the steamroller, which could be overwritten at any time. This is why you can use other recovery tools (such as Recuva) to restore data even after it has been emptied from the recycle bin. But the longer you wait (the more writes are done to the disk) the larger the probability that that section of the disk will be steamrolled over and 'corrupted' (at least from the perspective of the old file).", "You might also find helpful explanations in some of [these](_URL_0_) threads." ]

[ "Basically, when everyone is aware they must be married by 21, people compromise and settle quickly. Some of the prettiest or most socially dominant people in highschool (or equivalent age) would have first pick, then their friends would feel the need to catch up, and so on, until very nearly everyone had someone just because it's not fashionable not to. \n\nImagine if you could only ever sleep with your highschool prom date ever again, and if you didn't have one, that was it, you would have to go become a monk. You would imagine that a lot of people would make do with a decent prom date, and that sometimes people would marry only out of fear of being alone." ]

[ "Since the subreddit ban wave (Fatpeople hate ect.) reddit decided she was satan, and never really came back from that. \n\nSome people believe she's commercializing reddit and steering it away from its roots. \n\nPersonally I don't think we have the information to read her character one way or the other.", "Ellen Pao has done some controversial things since becoming CEO at Reddit, like banning FatPeopleHate and a handful of other subreddits. There's some criticism that she doesn't really understand what Reddit is about and, given her VC/business background, is only interested in monetizing Reddit instead of promoting the ideals of Reddit's founders and/or improving the functionality of the site for moderators and users.\n\nShe also has a somewhat checkered employment history, having sued a former employer for gender discrimination after being terminated. She eliminated salary negotiation at Reddit as a result, claiming that salary negotiation leads to gender-based wage disparity." ]

[ "In a diamond, the carbon atoms are all neatly lined up in a crystaline structure. Photons entering the lattice work from the right angles will pass right through it virtually unimpeded.\n\nIn graphite and other forms of carbon, the lattice work isn't there, and the atoms are in what you'd call a pile. So photons encounter resistance no matter where they hit it." ]

[ "Other repetitive patterns, such as loudness of notes, in pop music, bass and snare drum hits are closely synced to the meter. Listen for arpeggios on bass, guitars or pianos that are multiples of the meter. If music is less rhythmic, like just long slow legato notes on violins or synth pads, it will be harder to recognize. There is a less emphasized \"downbeat\" for you to find" ]

[ "That is just what happens when you cram a bunch of circles together. Bees make circular/cylindrical containers for their honey and eggs, since those have the most volume to wall material ratio.\n\nWhen these are all smushed together you get hexagons." ]

[ "It's just a very, very rare form of cancer so it's not heavily talked about. _URL_0_\n\nApparently the drummer of Kiss died from it, though.", "Yo ho ho! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n1. [ELI5: Why is heart cancer so rare? ](_URL_3_) ^(_ > 100 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: How come I hear about cancer in every organ except the heart? Why is heart cancer so rare/doesn't exist? ](_URL_3_) ^(_ > 100 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: Why is heart cancer so uncommon? ](_URL_3_) ^(_15 comments_)" ]

[ "This is how I've been told to think about it: it's not that the power plug is PUSHING power out to the device, it's that the device battery is PULLING power from the plug. When the battery is 'full', it stops PULLING thereby eliminating any further flow of electrons.\n\nCan anyone confirm?", "For the most part, the charger it stops drawing current once the device is charged, so there is no energy being used. Merely being plugged in doesn't mean that energy is being used." ]

[ "It is herd mentality. I nature it goes like \"everyone else is terrified and running away so I should also be terrified and running away\". There for in an angry mob everyone around you is angry, shouting and swearing ect so subconsciously you also feel you should be doing just this. Such mentality, as you called it, causes angry crowds to do things that individuals wouldn't and riots emerge.", "There sure is! It's called group theory in psychology.\nBasically, when we see a lot of people doing something, we think it's the thing we should be doing too, even if it's something we wouldn't normally do. We do this because we have an innate desire and need to fit in with society, because we're social creatures.\n\nThis is evident in the case of flash riots at sporting events, and even in smaller groups when someone offers up a bad idea/suggestion and no one says anything about it, because the person to their left or right nodded in agreement. If other people think it's good and right, then we should, too.\n\nFor a fun experiment, get your friends together and form a line outside of a business, like a coffee shop. Watch as newcomers and strangers start forming up behind you, even though they could just walk in and be served.", "Shame is an emotion that prompts us to conform to the group to avoid being exiled. Our affinity to being social was evolutionary wired because an outcast was more likely to be eaten by a predator or have a harder time foraging. \n\nIn a mob, each individual diffuses responsibility thinking that someone else will likely have the courage to think/act properly. The mob confers a degree of anonymity. Self awareness blends and we start to merge our identity with the group. Any antagonism or deviation gets misconstrued as a personal attack. Group think supplants our own individual critical faculties and the flow of ideas becomes bona fide." ]

[ "As a Canadian, I think the word you're looking for is *affluent,* not powerful.", "/r/AskHistorians would be a good place for a good answer to this, unless you really want ELI5's simplification.", "I seem to recall a French invasion... Losing a war along with a great deal of your land in Texas only next to be occupied by the French for six years will really set a nation back years.", "Mexia is pretty much as powerful as Canada. Canada is the 19 most powerful nation in the world, Mexico is the 21st.", "Mexico from the very beginning has been a country in which a very small number of people controlled most of the wealth and power. The majority of the population of Mexico has been historically poor without access to the economic or educational resources needed to spur development. The wealthy and powerful in Mexico have been more concerned with maintaining their own positions and power than in the development of the nation as a whole. This has lead to a culture of cronyism and corruption that has hobbled the Mexican economy for generations.", "I think corruption.. It makes some people control everything in early years up to mid 20th century and those few have let most of natural resources get exploited by foreing parties that have left nothing to the country also production models,," ]

[ "This is a myth. You can freeze and re-freeze food as much as you'd like, because the freezing process kills bacteria. The optimum temperature for bacterial growth is close to body temperature or higher for many bacteria (40° F and 140° F). This is the \"danger zone\".\n\nWhat you don't want to do is refrigerate food over and over again. Or freeze a giant meal, reheat the whole damn thing and let it sit out on the counter for a while, then refreeze the whole damn thing again. If you take a meal out of the refrigerator, heat it a little, then put it back in the refrigerator, you're bringing the temperature up into the \"danger zone\". If you do this over and over again, you allow the bugs to multiply a lot.\n\nFreezing rapidly can kill these bacteria. But you also have the risk of the toxins from the bacteria in your food (which will not be removed via freezing).\n\nCheck out the [USDA's page regarding leftovers](_URL_0_) before Republicans remove it from the website.\n\nThe best thing you can do is take leftovers as soon as you eat the food and separate them into smaller quantities for freezing. Then only bring out one portion at a time, heat it and eat all of it. Putting it back and forth into the fridge can be dangerous.", "It's to do with how many times food goes hot to cold/cold to hot. Every time it does the food goes through the optimum temperature zone for bacteria growth. So this increase the chances of I'd poisoning." ]

[ "Some types of sugar consist of a bunch of different sugar molecules chained together. For example, starch consists of long chains of glucose molecules, and has to be split into single glucose molecules by an enzyme. However, different types of sugar require different enzymes for this job, for example lactose (milk sugar) requires an enzyme called lactase, which some people don't have. For some types of sugar however, nobody has the required enzymes. \n\nThese types of sugar can however be broken down by bacteria in the guts, which use it as an energy source. In doing so, they produce gases." ]

[ "Basically the Deluth model states that if a domestic violence call occurs then the man gets arrested to ensure safety for the woman. This generally occurs irrespective of who called the police or what the story is when the police get there.\n\nThe men's lib movement sees this as a very bad thing and in areas where it occurs as described they are correct. However, like most other claims of discrimination in the modern west its impact is overstated in my opinion. It's kind of like quicksand, you probably grew up thinking quicksand was some kind of super death trap yet the mundane reality is that it has very little effect on your life unless you put yourself in specific circumstances for it to become a problem." ]

[ "Highways are sprayed with a salt solution in winter to prevent the formation of ice. Certain sections of highway are near water supplies and protected wilderness areas however. These sections are salted less in order not to contaminate the surrounding ecosystems.\n\nThey put the signs up to warn you that because there's less salt, there will likely be more ice." ]

[ "I am, of course, not Lou Reed's doctor but I'd imagine it's because livers, although very miraculous in their regenerative capabilities in some ways, aren't perfect.\n\nAs we age our organs, and all of us really, degrades. If it didn't we'd never get old. It's easily possible that he damaged it to a certain threshold way back when, and this threshold was above the functional level, but close to disaster.\n\nThen he aged a bit and the damage from years ago caught up with him.", "Organs fail all the time, and the risk increases as you age. A nondrinker can experience liver failure, and Keith Richards is still alive for some reason. A lot of it has to do with genetic predispositions." ]

[ "This is going to be a little hand-wavey.\n\nA differential equation describes how something changes very little when something else also changes very little. For example, speed describes how position changes, and acceleration describes how speed changes. The relationships between speed and position, and acceleration and speed, are called differential equations.\n\nDifferential equations describe almost everything in the universe. That's why it's so important to solve them.\n\nFor example, I know exactly how my speed makes my position change. How can I determine my position a long time into the future? To do that, I need to solve a differential equation.\n\nAnd if I know exactly how acceleration changes my speed, I can solve a differential equation to figure out my speed in the future.\n\nThe next step: If I know how acceleration changes speed, and how speed changes position, I can also figure out how acceleration changes position. That's another differential equation.\n\nWhen you take a differential equation, which only describes how something changes very little very close, and use it to predict BIG changes FAR away, that's called ***solving*** a differential equation.\n\nUnfortunately, solving differential equations turns out to be very difficult indeed.\n\nEdit: I'm assuming a five year old would want to learn about differential equations and what it *means* to solve them, not *how* to solve them. If the latter, you're in the wrong subreddit.", "Hey brohan, solving Differentials is just like integrating derivatives. Cake.\n\nSo first, just look at my name. It is a differential equation by itself, \ndy/dx = e^x. \n\n1st step you need to do is make sure all the y is one 1 side and all the x is on the other side. So my equation turns to dy = e^x dx.\n\nNow you can integrate to get rid of the dx, and you will get:\n\ny = e^x\n\nThat's it. Now, there might be more complicated problems, but basically, just try to simply everything so that you can easily integrate, and make sure you group the terms on different sides.", "Solving equations is supposed to find certain mathematical \"things\" (a real number, a complex number, the freaking curvature of spacetime) that satisfy certain criteria. The equation is how you express the criteria, the solution is what you are trying to find (what satisfies them).\n\nIn 5x+6=0 you are trying to find a real number using constraints created by applying operations on real numbers (addition multiplication etx)\n\nYou could do the same using a vector \nA*v+c=d and solve a linear equation\n\nore even using matrices\nD+X*A=B and try to find some matrix X\n\nYou could also do it with functions and here the operations on functions (in analogy with the addition of real numbers the matrix multiplication etc) include the differential operators which take a function and produce its derivative. \nYou can have Df=f' and you can think of D as something like the 5 in 5*x or the A in A*v\n\nYou can then do a differential equation like \nD^3 f + D^2 f +f=g\nand try to find the f function that satisfies it\n\nIn case you want more intuition about what the D does to f (as in what the matrix A does to vector v which is a matrix multplication) you can take infinite \"samples\" from f (the more you take the more you get closer to the real f) which behave like a vector v. Then D is like a matrix and what this matrix does is like take v1-v0 v2-v1 etc and apply some scaling, that is if you write the approximation of D as a matrix it becomes something tridiagonal, and the more the samples the closer it gets to the real D that takes f and produces f'", "Unfortunately, there is not an unique way to solve *symbolically* differential equations that works everytime (that's why we use computer for solving d.e. *numerically*). The difference between d.e. and normal equations is that you are not looking for a number as a solution, you are actually looking for an entire function. For example, when you find:\n\nẋ(t) = x(t)\n\nyou are looking for a function that, derived, gives itself again. The solution of this d.e. is\n\nx(t) = e^t\n\nbecause it is a function that gives itself again when you derive it.\n\nAn another example is:\n\nẍ(t) = -x(t)\n\nyou are looking for a function that, derived twice, gives itself again, with changed sign. A solution is:\n\nx(t) = sin(t)\n\nbecause if you derive sin(t), it gives you cos(t), which, derived again gives you -sin(t), which is the function you started with, with opposite sign. I hope this helped." ]

[ "I believe it's from the constant adjustments your body has to make from being bumped around. You never get the opportunity to sit still like you would on a couch.", "Stress may also be a factor, in addition to the physiological impacts the others stated. Feeling tired may be as much a mental situation in some cases based upon hormone balances. If you are nervous and view travel per bus/train as nerve-wracking, adrenaline productiob may increase during the experience. When done, instead of pure relief, you also feel more tired.", "There is a phenomenon called 'place lag,' basically the temporary disorientation of finding yourself in a new place. Your brain need time to catch up and reorient, and that takes resources.\n\nDecision fatigue is also an underappreciated part of travel. Making decisions is taxing. It uses up resources. That is why people like to do things like take the same route to work every day. It (generally) eliminates the need to make major decisions.\n\nMany people have anxiety around travel, over all forms of transportation and destinations. It doesn't have to be as dramatic as a massive fear of flying. It could be things like: Will I have a relaxing holiday? Will my hotel be okay? What if it isn't? Will I be able to find my around? What if something happens? Will everything be okay at home? What if I miss something at work? This sort of thinking is very fatiguing.\n\nI seriously question the muscle microadjustments thing. Your body is constantly making adjustments and dealing with gravity and stuff every second of the day, not *only* when you travel.", "The same is true of planes and cars, at least for me. It may be from sitting in a confined space for an extended period of time. I find travel exhausting, but so worth it." ]

[ "I think they would have to spend a lot more time together than you imagine, like maybe live together and spend a lot of time outside work/college with each other also." ]

[ "That would only work in the atmosphere, where the propellers have something to push: air. But the cable will experience the same amount of tension above the atmosphere, where there is no air for the propellers to push. The only real solution is to find a way to manufacture, in large quantity at reasonable cost, a material with the necessary tensile strength." ]

[ "It doesn't appear cyclic to the human eye. It appears cyclic to the human *brain*. \n\nOur eyes can detect 3 \"regions\" of color: red, green, and blue. If we detect some combinations of those, we typically perceive that as an \"in-between\" color. For example, orange light stimulates both the red and green sensing cells in our eyes. So stimulating the red and green cells is what we perceive as \"orange\". And, interestingly, if we just use red and green light (no orange light), we can stimulate those cells exactly the same as orange light, and so we still see orange. In fact, that's the basis for how computer and phone displays work: They only emit red, green, and blue light, and our brains perceive combinations of those as other colors.\n\nBut here comes the strangeness! What happens when you stimulate the red and blue cells in the eye with red and blue light? Well, your first guess is that we should perceive the color that is \"in between\" red and blue on the spectrum. But that color is green, and we're specifically *not* stimulating the green-detecting cells in our eyes. However, your brain isn't really capable of seeing it as two different colors (red and blue) simultaneously, so it invents a new color! Purple!\n\nThat's right, purple, the color that allows our sense of the spectrum to be cyclical, *isn't a real color*. There is no such thing as a purple photon of light. Purple can *only* be perceived by the human brain as a side effect of the limitations of our visual system.", "Just to add something extra to the excellent explanation already provided...\n\nOur color vision is usually a matter of our vision system interpolating between the colors detected by our three flavours of cones in our retina. Think of it like a triangle, with red, green and blue in the corners and all the other colors somewhere in the middle.\n\nBut then consider that a small percentage of human females are \"tetrachromats\". For them, there are 4 types of color receptors in their retina. For them, the perceived color is interpolated between 4 different points. You have to imagine this in 3d now, like a 3 sided pyramid with 4 point of detected color, and some interpreted color point somewhere in the 3d space of the pyramid.\n\nTetrachromats may be able to distinguish 100 million colors ...\n\n_URL_0_", "Could you also explain the question like I'm 5?", "Pink/ magenta bridges the gap between red and blue. Usually there would be no specific wavelength to represent pink, however our brains made up a colour to find the average wavelength of red and blue . It couldn't be green, since this new colour should be the opposite of green. There's a great explanation by minute physics on the topic.\n\n_URL_1_" ]

[ "Being both common and given value.\n\nBronze is a mix of copper and... On mobile, but I want to say iron. Looks nice, but isnt all that valuable.\n\nSilver is more valuable, but tarnishes.\n\nGold is a symbol of wealth and purity, and is the most valuable of the three.\n\nOther materials are not as common, harder to work with, or either too valuable to give up, or too cheap to mean anything.", "Europeans have used gold, silver and bronze have as coin metals since ancient times. They only really learned about platinum in the 18th and 19th centuries." ]

[ "The UK and the US have two different systems for broadcast TV signals. The US uses a system called NTSC, and the UK uses a system called PAL.\n\nPAL is slightly better than NTSC to start with, but converting an NTSC signal to PAL degrades it even further.\n\nAll the major US networks now broadcast an HDTV signal as well. That should be directly compatible with an HDTV broadcast in the UK and the quality should be indistinguishable. But I have no idea what the agreements are between the US news outlets and the British news outlets to exchange video clips so it may be that whatever source you're using for news is limited to NTSC clips.", "It is usually footage they found on the Internet posted by somebody that was there. Unless you actually saw a reporter." ]

[ "Soil is formed as leaves and stuff fall, also ferns, but once they fall, detritivores will break down material. Eventually it lets it’s nutrients go down to lower levels of soil(They have 4 horizons; O, A, B, C.) O is the organic matter, C is bedrock IIRC.\nSo first off, how many leaves do you think fall in a square foot of land at any given year, because that can be a major limiting factor. Also Temperature and Humidity also play a role, higher temperature gives more energy and water helps to break down and leech nutrients.\nSoil scientists will dig holes to look at the layers and they can also give a good description of the land. For the USA you can google, web soil survey, and look for a parcel of land that you are interested in and get a report about the predicted soils in your area(This is modeled, so always be sure to verify.)\nBecause soil takes so long to form some states like Idaho have listed it as a public resource, so you can’t do damage to it, in a forestry setting, you can’t run a machine too much on it. Washington kinda protects it, but more on the side, Washington has protections for the fish, which in turn protects the streams with a forested buffer, like 150-200’ wide from the stream bank, and also you can’t let too much sediment get into the stream from logging roads or erosion up stream. \nThe constitution gave states the right to manage their lands, other than national lands, so they have different rules between each state, Washington has one of the bigger rule books." ]

[ "That would necessitate two different water sources coming to your house and an additional plumbing system to keep your toilet separate from your sinks, showers, etc.", "It's perfectly possible, however as someone else said a separate piping system is required. Most toilets in Hong Kong are flushed with salt water.", "We could, but we don't because toilets are connected to the fresh water supply and running salt water through that is a bad idea. Changing that would require separate plumbing which as I'm sure you will understand is hella expensive to install after the fact.\n\nThere are, by the way, some places where toilets are flushed with some source of \"dirty\" (non-potable) water but it's usually limited to a single building.", "Becouse the pipes will rust from the salt water.\n\nThe reason is that the process of rusting involves electrons moving around, and electrons move more easily in salt-water than they do in clean water. A simple test of this is to see how easily current flows in clean water it does not), and then add salt to the water (when current does flow easily). :)", "You would need to install a second seperate plumbing system in your home and have salt water pumping stations and treatment plants. Salt water destroys expensive difficult to maintain machines very quickly." ]

[ "When you write software you use abstract terms. For a simplified example, you might say something like \"Show this model on the screen\". You do this through a graphics library like DirectX or OpenGL, or through some engine that converts it into a language like that.\n\nIn the long past, there was no graphics libraries, and there were no drivers from the manufacturers. The programmers would have to know exactly what commands to send to every card. Back then there were only a few models of popular video cards so this was something that could be done. But as there started to be more models of video cards it started to be too hard to do well. So maybe you need to load the shape of the model into the card in a very different way for one card than another.\n\nOut of this, OpenGL and eventually Direct3d became a thing. The cards were designed to accept more general terms like \"load this model\". The thing is the cards had to have some way of accepting these commands, and sometimes new cards with new features would come out and need to accept new features. You couldn't rewrite DirectX or OpenGL every time you wanted to use one of these features, and you don't know on the card immediately what's the best way to do something. \n\nSo a driver is another translation layer. The graphics library sends an instruction to the driver. The driver decides what the best way to convert that instruction into commands to send to the card is. When you get an updated driver it means that they've either fixed a problem in translation, or made an optimization that translates that better to the card that you have. When new games come out, sometimes the game uses features in a graphics library in ways that are unexpected and can be optimized by changing how they are translated and given to the card, it's in the card manufacturer's best interest to make sure their cards perform well so they often work with developers to make sure they can get the best performance, sometimes necessitating a new driver version.", "The hardware and software have to work together. The hardware never changes, but the software can change and evolve over time to offer better performance, more features, or in some cases even to fix minor errors in the hardware manufacturing process. Almost ever time there are new drivers released they increase performance. Sometimes the drivers include specific alterations to make a specific set of games run better, sometimes they just generally make all programs run better.", "Display drivers are incredibly complex pieces of software that act as intermediary between the OS (windows) and the GPU. However, windoes mostly is just passing messages from the game in question, so really both Windows and the driver sit between the game and the GPU.\n\nAny changes in the game or windows could nessissitate changes in the driver. While the GPU is static the other end of the equation is not, so you would expect some changes.\n\nIn addition, there are thousands of different combinations of hardware, OS and game, the driver must work with ALL of them ALL of the time. Testing budgets are limited so in the end they don't test all configurations with all games in all situations, so there are bound to be some conflicts that slip past. Therefore there are going to be bugfixes included in the driver updates.\n\nLastly, while your particular GPU might be static, both GPU companies tend to put out driver packages that go with a wide range of GPUs. When a new GPU is introduced they need to update that driver package even though your indivdual GPU has not changed. This system is beneficial to the consumer because it makes computability across many games easier." ]

[ "Switzerland is one of the wealthiest nations per capita on Earth. It achieved this feat in spite of being a landlocked country with pretty but mediocre land by offering an extremely business-friendly environment with low taxes. Thanks to this, even the poor of Switzerland are better off than the poor of most other countries.\n\nThe money for basic income must come from somewhere. To obtain it, you must raise taxes. The only place this tax money can come from is from the wealthy as taxing the poor would defeat the purpose.\n\nThe wealthy are highly mobile. Lower tax jurisdictions like Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Monaco are all close by. If the wealthy leave, their current taxes leave with them. Additionally, businesses will choose to expand in other nations, and move operations as Switzerland is already a terribly expensive place to be.\n\nFinally, this redistribution takes money from those who invest in growing an economy, and gives it to those who will primarily consume. It would reduce future economic growth that benefits everyone through jobs and class mobility.\n\nAs the wealthy and businesses flee, the country becomes poorer, unemployment rises, and basic income becomes unsustainable.", "It is the ultimate eventuality so we better start to prepare for it now. We are all progressing technologically and sooner or later all the lower end jobs will start to vanish (already happening) with increasing automation. \n\nThe biggest market of employment of min wage is fast food. That market will eventually goto automation maybe in a decade or so. That alone will create massive unemployment. Basic income will allow people with no skills to either learn new skills and move to higher up jobs without worrying about going homeless and ending up on street.\n\nBasic income is where we are heading whether we like it or not. There simply cannot be enough jobs for everyone. Without basic income and no jobs is a recipe for violence and upheaval." ]

[ "You might be referring to [this quote](_URL_1_) about computers \"thinking\".\n\n[Here is a really good video] (_URL_0_) where people build a computer out of domino pieces. You can clearly see that those dominoes perform calculation, but they do not \"think\", it just happens because of the way they are arranged.\n\nMetal does not think either. A computer does not think. A transistor puts out electricity (1 or 0) depending if you give it electricity or not. After all, it does not know what is 1 or 0. It is all just a bunch of transistors that electricity goes through, which in turn do calculations. A computer doesn't think \"what is answer to 2 + 2\", you just put electricity into it and it gives out the result. \n\n\nComputer seems to think, because programs on the screen somethings say such things. \"Waiting to download...\", \"Processing...\" etc. Those are just abstractions which are created so humans would have some analogy what the computer is doing. All in all it is just tiny transistors that do not think.\n\nThe computer does millions or even billions of similar calculations (like in the domino video) per second, sometimes the binary numbers represent data, like color, letter, internet address, sometimes instruction, sometimes something else.", "You've gotten plenty of good responses to this but I want to try my hand at it anyway. \n\nGround zero: We have things called transistors. These are basically just switches with 3 \"legs\". Two of the legs are the ends of a switch. The third leg controls whether those legs are connected. If I put voltage on the control leg, I connect the other two legs. If I take the voltage away, the two legs are no longer connected. If voltage is present we can say it's a \"1\", otherwise we can say it's a \"0\". We build these transistors out of that special rock Silicon because it's a semi conductor. It's not the only one but it's been the best one so far for various reasons. (Cheap, abundant, performs well enough, etc.)This is close enough to true for us to move on :)\n\nNext level: Putting these switches (transistors) together in special ways we can create slightly smarter switches called logic gates. These smarter switches can be made with multiple inputs that have to be in just the right pattern to turn the switch on. There's \"AND\" gates, and \"OR\" gates, and \"NAND\" gates, and \"NOR\" gates. (One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish... sorry). AND gates require both inputs to be 1 to turn on. OR gates only require either input to be 1 to turn on. Putting these gates together in special ways we can make things like adders, multipliers, comparators, etc. \n\nThe general theme here is that we started at almost nothing and build tools (transistors) that let us build other tools (logic gates) that let us build other tools (adders, multipliers, etc.) and so on. You've heard the term \"abstraction\" a lot in this thread which is exactly what's happening. \"Abstraction\" is basically building the tools of one level using all the expertise required for that (like transistors) and passing those off to someone else to work on the next set of tools (logic gates). That next guy doesn't have to worry about complicated things like transistor biasing, current requirements, electron tunneling, gate width, element doping, substrate separation rules, etc. All that next level guy has to worry about is that transistors act like switches! THAT is abstraction! And this idea works its way all the way up the chain.\n\nEventually we get to processors, memory, programming languages, and pixels on a string. It all comes down to flipping switches in an impossibly fast and complicated manner.", "> How did we get metal to think? \n\nBy:\n\n* building an electrical component (transistor) where a voltage on one line can act as a very fast switch on a different line.\n* finding a super-miniuaturized production process for these components.\n* wiring them together in increasingly complex systems to store numbers, do calculations on those numbers and come up with calculations we can interpret as \"thinking\".\n\n > How does it know what the 1's and 0's are? \n\nIt doesn't. Even the 0 and 1 are human interpretation of electrical charges and voltages.\n\n > Is it at it's core mechanical?\n\nNo, it is at its core electrical.", "It does not know what 1's and 0's are. We give meaning to a different combinations of them and we found out that were able to \"easily\" put the \"language\" of 1's and 0's to mechanical use. The CPU itself doesn't really know you typed \"a\". It sees \"01100001\".", "Imagine how a water wheel works. Water pours over the wheel and turns it because of gravity thus generating power which is of course useful to us humans. Is the water thinking? or the wheel? The answer is no. Humans just figured out a way to set it up so that it could be beneficial to us and computers are similar. Instead of water though we are dealing with electricity and instead of a wheel we have circuits. Same concept though. Circuits are designed in a way such that when electricity flows through them things happen. If you build up enough of these circuits in clever ways you can get them to perform functions and get enough functions together and you basically have a computer." ]

[ "The carbonation helps to disperse remaining alcohol from the palate and tongue. \n\nPlus, it has a sugary taste.", "Alcohol is hard like a brick. So it's like you lick a brick and want to get that taste out of your mouth. So you want something soft like a sponge or soda to wash that taste from your mouth.", "Soda has a lot of sugar in it, which helps to \"sweeten\" the taste of whatever you are drinking. This counteracts the harshness of the alcohol you are drinking. Also, the carbonation helps to disperse the alcohol from your throat, which makes the drink more palatable." ]

[ "> \"Development hell or development limbo is media industry jargon for a state during which a film or other project remains in development without progressing to production. A film, video game, television program, screenplay, computer program, concept, or idea stranded in development hell.\"\n\n\nTL;DR When a game/film is not making any progress/being scrapped and restarting, Example: completely starting from scratch over and over\n\nSource: Google/Being a developer.", "When they keep getting delayed, or even in some cases cancelled. Only to return later and eventually be completed. Sometimes from an entirely different developer.", "Between the time someone gets an idea for \"Hey, lets go make this video game\" and the time it's a finished game available for purchase, the game is \"In Development.\" Sometimes, games spend longer in development than what you'd expect.\n\nMaybe the company had to reassign some programmers, which means the remaining staff need longer to get the game finished.\n\nMaybe the game engine they were building on put out a new version, and everything they've wrote for the game has to be tweaked to work right.\n\nMaybe halfway through the project, the team lead decides to switch to a different game engine entirely, and everything has to be thrown out and the programmers start over.\n\nMaybe the neat new game mechanic that sounded so neat in the design outline turns out to be a really horrible experience to actually play, and the team has to come up with something to replace it. \n\nAll of these can make the expected development time for a game expand like an inflating balloon. Every project gets a little schedule slip, but when too many of these factors stack up for a single game, an outsider who's been patiently waiting for the game since it was announced, only to hear the release date has been pushed back again, might start to worry \"Man, those developers seem to be having a hell of a time putting the game together, I hope the quality doesn't suffer when it finally comes out.\" Smart companies will hold out on announcing that they're working on a title until they're reasonably sure that they've passed all the points that they may have to do major rework that'd impact the release date." ]

[ "By comparison, Americans would think it weird that in parliamentary systems, you literally have no say in who becomes the head of your government.\n\nOur system is a first-past-the-post (FPTP) system, in which case there is mathematically no reason not to have just two big-tent parties that cover a wide amount of the electorate. It doesn't matter if you win or lose by 1% or by 20%, a loss is a loss is a loss, and a win is a win is a win. Many have issue with the FPTP system, and want it changed, but doing so is probably going to require a Constitutional Amendment, which would be rather hard to pass.\n\nIt also doesn't help that the two major third parties in the US are both rather insane, and thus are marginalized because of how crazy their party members are. Case-in-point, Jill Stein is on record stating that wifi hurts children's minds, and her party (the Greens) held that vaccines cause autism right up until this Spring. In addition, Gary Johnson is considered a moderate by his party (the Libertarians) and barely won their nomination, and yet he wants to return the US to a commodity-backed currency, and believes that we shouldn't fight global warming because the Sun is going to destroy the Earth in a few billion years anyway.", "The answer is rooted in history. \n\nWhen America was founded, there were no political parties. At least, not in the sense that we think of them. It was believed that there would be many candidates running on different platform. Further complicated matters, the 13 states had very different population sizes; the populated states thought that they should have the most voting power, but there were concerned that more sparsely populated areas would essentially be overlooked.\n\nTo solve this problem, they set up the American system of voting. Any candidates that meet the qualifications may run, and state receive a set of electors equal to the number of Congressional representatives they have. States have, at a minimum, 3 representatives: exactly 2 in the Senate, and 1 or more in the House of Representatives based on their population from the last Senate. Electors tend to vote for the candidate that wins their state (some states legally require this, but this is not true over the entire nation), and in Maine and Nebraska, the electors split their votes according to state laws, in which not all votes go to the winner of the state. Whoever has at least half the electors voting for them wins.\n\nFurther, in the original system, the runner-up becomes the Vice President. Because the Vice President has only 2 official duties (to carry out the President's duties if the President can't, and to break ties and preside over the Senate), it was thought that this wouldn't be a problem. The 12th amendment changed that (I won't get into all the reasons here; Google if you're interested). Under the 12th amendment, electors vote separately for a President and a Vice President, and it is very strongly expected that the electors will elect the VP of the Presidential candidate's choice.\n\nFurther, because they expected more than 2 candidates, they had a solution if nobody get a majority of electors: the take the top 3 candidates and the House of Representatives votes, with 1 vote for each state cast. This happened only 1 time in U.S. history (1824; interestingly enough, all the candidates that year were from the same party).\n\nToday, we have 2 overwhelmingly dominant political parties that are extremely bitter rivals. They didn't see that one coming. \n\nThere are measures that could be taken to soften this, and some states and cities use slightly different voting schemes. Today is more than just a national election: lots of issues are going to be on the ballots, the people of Maine are voting on whether or not they wish to use one scheme, known as ranked choice voting, in their elections, which allows people to vote for 3rd party candidates and still support the party they really want (Google for details). Some states also have non-partisan, independent commissions to determine voting districts to prevent gerrymandering, which would favor certain candidates by making their seats safe from challengers. \n\nHowever, to change US politics at the national level, that would require an amendment to the US Constitution. That document is inordinately difficult to amend, and that was done deliberately, as any Amendment can threaten the balance of power in the government or scale back the rights of the citizens. I won't go into the whole process, but suffice it to say that any attempt at electoral reform would not favor the politicians who got into office, so they have no advantage in proposing reforms. The best the states can do is to call for a new Constitutional convention...but that has its own sets of risks, as the process of writing a new Constitution from scratch threatens issues such as individual rights, state sovereignty levels, the scope of the federal government, how grievances could be addressed, etc.\n\ntl;dr: it was set up this way, it's hard to change, and the people who could change it have everything to lose and nothing to gain by trynig.", "Imagine you’re in a room with 99 children. If you ask the children what they would like for a snack, they all might pick something different. Well, you don’t have time for that. So, you say, “Hey, children, would you like Chocolate Chip Cookies or Snickerdoodles? Whichever gets the most votes, I’ll go out and buy.” So, now almost half the children say Chocolate Chip Cookies, and almost half the children say Snickerdoodles, and then you have Larry and Tom saying “Oreos” because obviously Oreos are the best despite not being an option.\n\nBeing the nice caregiver you are, you let Larry and Tom say “Oreos” well, because, why not? It doesn’t matter anyway. Chocolate Chip Cookies or Snickerdoodles will win the day! You start listing on the chalkboard all the pros and cons of the Chocolate Chip Cookes and Snickerdoodles. Chocolate Chip Cookies are messy because of the chips. Snickerdoodles are a little crunchier. And then Larry and Tom are all like, “Hey, what about Oreos?”\n\nOh, right, Oreos. Okay. Oreos are really messy and leave crumbs everywhere. But I guess they do have that filling.\n\nSo, then, the Pro-Chocolate Chip Cookies Children form a group called CCC and the Snickerdoodle Children form a group called Yum (because why not?). \n\nYou definitely want the Children to be happy about the choice. So, you decide that if 51% of the Children pick a cookie, the chances of nap time success would greatly increase (as opposed to 34%/33%/33%). So, you make a rule that the winner has to have at least 51% of the vote. Now, while Tom sure loves his Oreos, he would absolutely be crushed if they picked Snickerdoodles. So, he decides that he would rather vote CCC because he knows Oreos will not win. Larry is left to vote Oreo (but obviously will not succeed).\n\nSo, everyone votes. And it ends up 51 CCC, 47 Yum, and 1 Oreo.\n\nHowever, wait. I then decide that I need to add another layer to this to make sure it’s fair and equal. I bring in 5 parents. Each one will represent a group of children. Whatever that group of children decides on, that will be the parent’s vote. The children are divided up by age. However, each age group has a different number of people. So, the parents' votes will be that each group gets 2 votes automatically and then 1 vote per 5 kids. This is “fair” because each age group feels like they get a say despite being perhaps smaller but also some groups may have more votes because there are more people.\n\nAnd of course, if none of the parents' votes reach that 51% threshold, *I* get to pick the cookie...\n\nAnyway, that was early America. If you want current America, replace Chocolate Chip Cookies, Snickerdoodles, and Oreos with Broccoli, Brussels Sprouts, and Cauliflower. Now, you’re just picking which one is the least awful.", "You seem to be under the impression that we only get one vote for one position. There are a number of different positions that we are voting on today.\n\nI just voted today.\n\nI cast a vote for my pick for President/vice-president.\n\nI cast another vote for my pick for the US Senate (we have two senators per state, the terms are 6 years, so you get a say every 2/4 years on one or the other).\n\nI cast a vote for my pick for the US House of Representatives (2 year terms, you're always voting for one for your district, not for other districts even in the same state).\n\nI also voted for various other more local politicians and issues. The 4 state level questions, to give you some examples, were marijuana legalization, gun regulation, electricity market deregulation, and a tax-exemption for certain medical equipment.\n\nSo, it's not a lost vote if my presidential candidate doesn't win. My vote will still count in any number of other races and issues.\n\nThe difference is, you get ONE vote that is your sole expression of opinion on the all the issues. I can vote for a president, and an opposition party senator, and an even different party for the House of Representatives, if I so choose. I also have a direct say in a number of legislative issues. So, it might seem a bit weird to me that you have such a limited voice.", "Weird is a relative term. I'm going to take a risk and speak in absolutes, but to my knowledge, there is no \"normal\" voting system. Many places have different systems in place. If it seems strange to you, that's probably because it is different than what you are used to. But it isn't objectively weird, just different." ]

[ "Part of what allows Herbivores to grow as large as they do is that the Digestive Systems in Herbivores are optimized for extracting every bit of protein available from the food they eat. Their digestive tracts can also make some proteins from food that lack proteins. A good example is a a cow's Digestive Tract: It has four stomachs, all for getting the most nutrient possible out of every bite. \n\nAlso, plants aren't necessarily devoid of protein. Plants have Keratin, which most predators, and humans, can't digest. Herbivores however, usually can digest it. This greater diversity to what a Herbivore can eat allows them to have access to a surprising amount of protein and nutrients.", "The largest land mammals are still all herbivores.", "First of all, animals don't use proteins from their food to use as building blocks. If they did, then animal proteins would have to be the same as plant proteins, which they rarely are. \n\nInstead, they break down ingested proteins into amino acids, then use instruction from their DNA to assemble them into their own proteins. As it happens, most plants are a poor source of protein but they do contain amino acids. They also contain something more important to sustaining herbivores, *cellulose*.\n\nMost ruminants have a complex digestive system that consists of multiple 'stomachs' that are used to ferment the cellulose to extract useful nutrients from it. A *symbiotic* relationship with various bacteria that live in the animals digestive system has developed. These bacteria ferment and break down the cellulose and in the process they reproduce, multiplying greatly in number. The animal then eats the results of this fermentation, bacteria and all, which it uses to sustain its own vitality and growth.\n\nTL;DR - bacteria are the main source of protein for many herbivores.", "Herbivores are constantly eating. You ever see a cow? If you have, chances are, it was eating. I'd wager to say that giant dinosaurs spent their entire day eating. They eat so much and digest every single nutrient that they can.", "More oxygen 150 million years ago > > Bigger creatures.\n\nJust something to remember about all the dinosaurs. Don't know the specifics about herbivores though." ]

[ "You're comparing two different cash methods. Payroll uses ACH (automated clearinghouse) transfers, while Square Cash uses the debit card network.\n\nSquare cash works by instantly debiting the sender's bank account, just like if they used their debit card at a store. The sender instantly receives the money, as it is treated like a debit card refund. Debit card transactions have to work fast because funds need to be confirmed available at point of sale. If there's no money availble, the purchase will be declined.\n\nWhen your paycheck is transfered to you, it uses an ACH network, which is a large conglomerate of bank transfers using your bank account number and bank routing number. It is essentially a digital check. These transfers are done in batches, and take longer to process, usually take at least 24 hours.\n\n\n\nTL;dr: Square cash uses debit cards while payroll uses digital checks" ]

[ "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. It's not really a law of nature, just a saying. It's not named after anyone specific, just check the wiki page for it. \n\nIt's not so much applied as a law, just a thing to keep in mind. If you design something that works 99% of the time but that 1% of the time it kills someone, you need to design that flaw out. \n\nTl;Dr is a saying, engineers like it because sometimes we build things that hurt people.", "How can it be applied? \"About the time i fix my car, it'll get in an accident and be totalled\" --murphy's law really works for us cynical types." ]

[ "Your hard drive is a round plate, kind of like an old record. It's divided into thousands and thousands of \"sectors\", tiny little spots. \n\nEach one of those tiny spots is a byte... When you save a byte on your hard drive, the drive head makes a change in the magnetic charge in that spot.\n\nThe computer turns these positive and negative magnetic charges into ones and zeroes.", "Think of it this way. \n\nYou have a large plate with the whole surface area covered in small 1 cm^3 cubes (think, > 10^1000 cubes), each side having either a 0 or 1 on it. It already takes up space, but when your hard drive pin drives its magnet over these cubes, it changes it from 0 to 1 or vice versa. \n\nThe containers that hold bytes take up space, but writing bytes to them simply changes the orientation of these bytes.\n\nOR\n\nyou have a box full of air. You pump in different air, while venting out the old. Space occupied is the same, but composition is different.", "It's more like resolution. \n\nYou can \"see\" some pretty tiny pixels on your computer screen. \n- or some pretty small ink dots on paper. \n\nBeyond some point in 'smallness', your eyes have a hard time making anything meaningful out of those small marks. \n\nThe way data is stored on magnetic media ( spinning hard disk plates) is related to how small we can make a reliable reading of what each bit means. \n\nThe capacity of your drive is how many reliable - separate - bits can be read with the current, consumer-level tech. \n\n\n\nEDIT - to your follow up on /u/mobyhead1; \nbits are a magnet that can be flipped.. on or off, 0 or 1, N or S. \nbytes are a grouping of 8 bits that mean something together.", "You can say it doesn't take physical space.\n\nA new harddrive is completely filled with random garbage data.\n\nYou divide the harddrive into chunks and keep track of it in a table. As you write into it (i.e. modify the random garbage into useful data), you mark off chunks as being \"actual information/not garbage\" in the table.\n\nOnce you mark off every chunk as being actual information, you have \"filled up the harddrive\".", "On the platter of a hard drive, a byte takes up eight (since it is made up of eight bits) teeny, tiny areas of the ferromagnetic surface of the disk with a particular magnetic charge. How small that area is depends on the precision of the read/write head, and other additional factors.", "Any storage manipulates atoms as a storage medium. Atoms, though small, take up a measurable amount of space. Hence, storage is limited by available physical space." ]

[ "The key to art history is to ask who the art was meant to be viewed by. At the time of Mondrian's rise the \"art world\" was moving away from photorealism thanks to photographs and into more experimental areas. He's basically just an extension of the opinions of that time that created Van Gogh et al. Think of it like someone from the distant future listening to dubstep and shaking his head thinking how that could be music without first having the cultural backdrop we have today of dance music, techno pop, synth bands etc etc. If you really want to appreciate it you have to understand the art atmosphere of the time, ie the 'new york school', and how that created the art we have today. TL:dr : He wowed the guys of his time by taking what was already happening to the next level." ]

[ "Because your subconscious moves and thinks at a much faster rate than your conscious mind. If a dream that only lasts for a few seconds in reality can seem like it lasts hours in your dream state then it's quite obvious your subconscious can keep up with the speed of its own creation." ]

[ "Relations between Russia and Finland had been strained since WWI. \n\nRussia felt that Finland was weak, and that they would be able to easily seize a decent chunk of territory. Most of the rest of Europe was distracted by Germany gearing up to start WWII, and so the Russians felt that nobody else would really do much to help Finland if they invaded.", "As Russia (technically, the USSR) under Stalin was getting off her knees, she wanted to restore her influence in the parts of the Russian Empire that were lost after the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. The Secret Protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and later amendments defined the borders of these parts. Eastern Poland, the Baltic countries and Bessarabia were annexed to the USSR against the will of their populace (technically, there were elections, where 98% of the adult population voted, and 98% of them supported the pro-annexation candidates, but they were obviously fake). Finland was also in the Soviet sphere of influence. The Soviets wanted her to give up an industrialized heavily populated region close to Leningrad in exchange for (admittedly, greater in area) unpopulated swamps. Their pretext was that Leningrad was the biggest industrial center in the Soviet Union, and should a big war come (and a big war soon came), it should be easier to defend. The Finns said, \"Njet, Molotoff!\" This started the war. The casus belli was the shelling of a village on the Soviet side; the Finns had no incentive to do so, so it was probably as fake as the false flag \"Polish\" takeover on the Gleiwitz radio station that triggered World War II.\n\nNow, when two countries go to war, usually they recognize each other's governments as legitimate. When the Americans fought with Japan, they issued the Potsdam declaration to the Japanese government in Tokyo, and when that government accepted it, the war stopped. The Americans didn't say, \"the government in Tokyo is a fake one; the real Japanese government is in Honolulu.\" However, this is what the Soviets were saying until the very end of the Winter War: the Helsinki government does not legitimately represent the Finnish people; the only legitimate Finnish government is in Terijoki (an occupied village), headed by Otto Kuusinen (a Finnish communist who lived in the USSR since 1918). This self-proclaimed \"Finnish Democratic Republic\" signed a \"treaty\" with the USSR; the [text of the \"treaty\"](_URL_0_) said that it would be ratified in Helsinki. By the \"treaty\" a large chunk of Soviet Eastern Karelia went to the \"Finnish Democratic Republic\". Local Soviet Communist Party cadres from Eastern Karelia were told not to leave so they could prepare the Finnish people for building socialism. No one knows whether, if Stalin had succeeded installing Kuusinen in Helsinki, he would have headed a satellite state like People's Poland or a Union Republic like the annexed Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian SSR.\n\nAs far as I know, this is why the Winter War happened. How it went, and what happened later, is another story." ]

[ "When data is transmitted over a wire, the wire is turned on and off very quickly. Thousands of times per second, it checks if the wire is currently on. If the signal is off, that is interpreted as a 0. If it's on, that's a 1.\n\nLight travels through fiber optic cables. It's basically done the same way, but instead of electricity it uses flashes of light." ]

[ "Per the [Outer Space Treaty](_URL_0_) of 1967, governments cannot stake a claim to territory in space—so yes, space is indeed borderless. However, to get to outer space, Spacex's rockets first have to pass through the airspace directly above the US, which the Federal Aviation Administration *does* have jurisdiction over, thus requiring their approval." ]

[ "In ancient times people believed the seed of your emotions was in your chest because whenever you are angry, stressed, scared, excited, etc. you can physically feel something happening in your chest that correlates to that emotion (i.e. if you are very scared, the rhythm of your heartbeat increases rapidly, which you can feel and associate with being scared)." ]

[ "Police actively enforce the Child Pornography issues so its forced to go much much more underground and its generally illegal everywhere.\n\nPiracy is a copyright issue. A police officer cant arrest you for just being in possession of a digital copy of a movie. The owner of the copyright has to put a claim against you etc. Its more complicated and then they can charge you etc. It just being online isn't in and of itself illegal right off the bat.", "A lot of it has to do with the seriousness of the crime. Consider how active the police are to find someone accused of a DUI compared to one who doesn't stop at a stop sign. Both are not legal, however they do not endanger other citizens in the same way. \n\nA child pornographer is harming innocent children and likely damaging their lives, a DUI driver has the same potential.\n\nSomeone who is pirating movies is harming society and the makers of the movie, but they are not really endangering anyone's life, same as someone who doesn't stop at a stop sign completely.", "Police forces around the world are actively looking for, and taking steps to remove images and videos of child abuse. TV shows and moves require copyright holders to make requests, then get the courts involved if those requests are ignored. It's a much less urgent issue." ]

[ "Hot water generally cleans better but ages the clothes faster. Unless it's stained, I wash cold/cold and hang all my good shirts, shorts, and pants to dry. Warm *should* wash fastest, since it should fill the washer faster. YMMV.\n\nIf you follow the care labels on your clothing they will last a lot longer than if you warm wash everything and machine dry everything on normal or heavy settings.", "The tag on your clothes will say what water temperature to use. \n\nGenerally though: \n\nCold- \nThings that are delicate like lingerie, pantyhose, wool, lace, etc. Anything that bleeds like those damn red socks. Anything that has bodily fluids on it like blood or semen. \n\nWarm- \nDark colors, anything that needs permanent press, synthetic fabrics (spandex and the like) \n\nHot- \nCotton, whites, things that are very dirty, things that aren't delicate at all like jeans, coveralls, etc. and towels. \n\n\nIn practice, you could just throw it all in there together and put it on cold, but it's not going to get the dirtiest things *as* clean and Martha Stewart will pop out of your fabric softener and give you a stern look.", "Unasked advice but nowadays they make specialized detergents that are made for cold water only. I highly highly recommend always* using cold water, about half as much detergent as the labels say, and adding something like Borax to the wash. Also, use the gentlest cycle. Most people do not soil their clothing nearly enough to require the kinds of washing we put our clothes through.\n\n*Heavy work clothes may need hot water + biological solvents to be completely cleaned.", "The quick answer is usually:\nWhites = Hot;\nLights = Warm;\nDarks = Cold", "Since your direct question was already answered, this key will help you understand what your clothing tags mean:\n_URL_0_", "General tip I got when I moved out was Colors = Cold. Whites = warm.", "washing at hot temperatures is more effective against _URL_1_", "May I have another washing machine related question here?\n\nWhy on Earth do I have to wait like 1-2 minutes before I can open the door? I understand 5 seconds. 10 seconds. But why minute? Either the washing is finished or I interrupt it. It happens on every machine I used." ]

[ "When you pay for a high price lawyer, you're paying for skill and time. An expensive lawyer has several paralegals working under him that can spend a lot of time digging through old court cases looking for cases like yours. Once the lawyer has these cases, he can craft an argument based on them stating why you are innocent or deserve a lighter sentence.", "Generally better access to research and knowledge of precedents that could be used in your defense.\n\nPrivate attorneys are also usually less chummy with the prosecutors than a public defender, which can be a factor.\n\nThey also tend to have more of a stake in the outcome given that their reputation is partially invested in it - a client that gets acquitted can refer other people to them. One that is incarcerated is far less likely to.", "The public defenders I know are very smart and very passionate about what they do. They're very capable lawyers. The problem is that they are paid a flat salary by the state to show up to court and do their job. No overtime or anything like that. If you have a complicated case that requires a lot of case law research or work beyond the normal hours a public defender is paid to work, you're probably not going to get someone going above and beyond the call of duty. As a matter of professional responsibility, any lawyer has the duty to vigorously represent their client, public or not. But is your public defender going to be staying up till 3 AM at the office while his marriage suffers? Probably not. \n\nOften the reason why is not because they don't care about your case. It's that a lawyer working as a public defender usually has a private practice on the side, with obligations to other clients that are paying them by the hour to work on their case. With a finite number of hours in the week, there are some tough choices to make. You could spend 10 hours researching a case for someone you are representing as a public defender, but you're not getting paid any more for that work. Meanwhile, you have to worry about keeping the lights on at your private practice. And guess what? Without that private practice to keep you afloat, you wouldn't be able to afford being a public defender. \n\nIf you meet the financial criteria, and your case is fairly straightforward (i.e. you don't have an extensive criminal history and you were busted for something that doesn't involve a homicide/murder or being the head of a massive drug cartel) then going with a public defender is perfectly fine! Public defenders are often chummy with the prosecutors, which can help your case. No prosecutor is going to be an out and out dick to a public defender he has to share a bathroom with. But if you have anything complicated, it is worth your money to hire a private attorney.", "Side issue, but in my experience they don't! I consistently see public defenders provide far better representation than private attorneys, even expensive, well-known, billboard-advertising attorneys, *especially* if the case goes to trial. \n\nI'm sure that's not the case everywhere... maybe we just have really good public defenders here!" ]

[ "To threaten an imposing or suspected danger, to make it clear it means business and will attack or defend whatever is being contested with aggression, to notify others it is angry, and signal others to stay the hell away and scare off potential enemies. They hiss when they are angry, territorial, startled, in pain or in other distress.", "It's a threatening/warning sound. The cat is worried about something and it fully prepared to kick it's butt if it doesn't go away. It's basically a \"Last Warning\" kind of thing. Cats don't have a harsher warning that doesn't involve actual violence." ]

[ "The person collecting will go through a process where they seize the person's assets. There are restrictions to what they can seize, like I think they have to leave you one vehicle (probably depends on the jurisdiction) and after they've done that, potentially garnish wages. \n\nFor the most part though, everyone involved knows you're not going to get three million out of your average joe. What's more important, though, is that there will probably be an appeal. Now, the odds aren't actually great that the apartment complex will get three million again (nature of appeals). BUT they've already shown they have a very strong case and the judge is willing to find in their favor. So what happens? They figure out how much they CAN get from the guy, and go settle for that amount. Maybe half a million. The guy says, well shit, it'll ruin my business but at least I won't be miserable having one car and a studio apartment the rest of my life. And he takes the deal. This is great for the plaintiff because they know they're never really getting their three million, and they don't have to go through a lengthy collection process, appeal process, and wait on garnished wages. They just get a lump sum of half a million dollars.", "> Do they garnish his wages & tax returns forever?\n\nYes. He's got a court ordered judgment against him. It stays there forever, and pretty much anything he owns is subject to seizure until he pays it off." ]

[ "in statistics, its very hard to get an exact number. Most of the calculations for certain statistics come with that factor, a margin of error. Its basically the amount of possible variance in the answer. so 20% with a margin of error of 5% means the actual answer could be from 15%-25% but its definitely somewhere in there.", "I'd suggest reading up on margin of error as it relates to physical measurements. It's easier to understand and a lot more cut & dry compared to the wild and woolly area of sociology.\n\nIf I make a physical measurement, say measuring the length of Trump's longest hair using a ruler, I might come up with 10.4 cm (sorry 'murica)\n\nHowever, I know that between my eyesight and the fact that the marks on the ruler are only ever millimeter, the real answer isn't actually 10.4 cm, though it might be close.\n\nSo based on the ruler having 1 mm marks, I might say that while I read it as 10.4, it's probably between 10.35 and 10.45 or .5 mm up or down. I'd express this by saying 10.4 +/- 0.1 cm\n\nNow let's say I'm want to add the lengths of two of Trump's hairs. One at 10.4 +/- 0.1 cm and another at 8.6 +/- 0.1 cm. When you add measurements, you add their margins of error, so you get 19 +/- 0.2 cm for the total length of the two hairs.\n\n\nSo basically margin of error in polls is the same concept but applied to stated preferences. (not necessarily any relation to actual preferences or actual voting, just covering the polling companies ass in how they performed the survey)" ]

[ "The bullet is launched out of the gun by an explosion that superheats the air and produces a loud BAM sound. The gas/air that carries that sound wave doesn't have anywhere to go except out with the bullet. A silencer basically extends the barrel and helps that \"explosion air\" diffuse in other directions so that the resulting explosion from the gunshot is much quieter.\n\nMovies and games that have a \"pew pew pew\" sound with the silencer attached are doing it wrong - it really is still an explosive sound, just heavily subdued, like a brick hitting a sandbag or something.", "They’re a little louder than they are portrayed to be in movies...one thing most people don’t know about suppressors, is they are really uncomfortable to use. When you shoot guns with them , the suppressor causes a lot of gasses/gunpowder to travel back through the firearms receiver and sprays right into your face...every time I’ve shot guns with suppressors, after about 30 shots my eyes would be stinging, and watering , and I could barely see.", "5 year olds love balloons. Firing a gun without a suppressor is like popping a balloon. If you were to untie the balloon and let the air out slowly, yes you might get that hilarious fart sound, but it's much quieter. The hot gas in the barrel expels through the suppressor, slowing it down as it reaches the outside air. When the bullet leaves the barrel, the hot gas escapes at a higher pressure than outside air pressure. (Also when the bullet leaves the barrel, it creates that \"snap, crackle, pop\". So when you use a suppressor, you want to use sub-sonic ammunition.)\n\nOther ways and ages to see it are opening a can of soda quickly vs slowly. (You know when you sneak one from the kitchen at 3am and you don't want your parents hearing, so you muffle the hssss sound and forget the can still makes that \"crack\" sound when it opens. Sub-sonic ammunition gets rid of that.)\n\nAlso for adults, opening a champagne bottle by popping it open or slowly releasing the built up carbonation inside. Same concept all around.", "Exactly like a muffler for a car. \n\n“Loud” is heat and pressure. Creating baffles allows the hot gas to expand, when it expans it cools so by the time the round cones out of the suppressor, most of the hot angry high pressure gas is gone." ]

[ "Homes generally do not have access to the high flow water sources required to make one of those toilets work.", "_URL_0_\n\nTL;DR Insufficient flow in residential water systems to trigger the siphon effect to clear the bowl." ]

[ "It's not really a giant health insurance plan, it's a bunch of reforms to the health care system, one of which being an online marketplace where you can buy private health insurance. The main issue that Republicans have is that one of the reforms is that having health insurance is now mandatory, and there will be a tax penalty for anyone who chooses not to buy it." ]

[ "For sexually reproducing species, incest is often problematic because closely related family members are likely to share genetic problems with you that are then exacerbated in the children of incestuous couples. For this reason, many species have some sort of control against incest, typically behavioral. In humans, that control is revulsion at the idea of having sex or even thinking about sex with people who we had close contact with growing up. If we were not disgusted by envisioning family members engaged in sexual acts we might instead be aroused. This would create an evolutionary pressure against the aroused group because their children and their children's children wouldn't be able to breed as well and the family arousal trait would be out-competed by the the family disgust trait.", "Reproducing with close relatives is associated with a high frequency of birth defects and other genetic issues. This led to the evolution of human sexual behavior that generally excludes attraction to close relatives. Otherwise this type of reproduction would be very common, considering how much time we spend around close relatives." ]

[ "Many sour foods are poisonous, we are programmed to reject sour foods with \"disgust\", same as when you see other unhealthy things like feces and Kanye West. \n\nThere was a good BBC Horizon show on Disgust years back. I found this article.\n\n_URL_0_", "> By a combination of direct intake of hydrogen ions (which itself depolarizes the cell) and the inhibition of the hyperpolarizing channel, sourness causes the taste cell to fire action potentials and release neurotransmitter.\n\nbasically what this means is that the sour item (i think exclusively acids) actually causes the nerves in your face to fire making the muscles they control contract. it's like you drank liquid electricity (which isn't too far off, sour substances are generally acids and cause hydrogen ions (protons) to break off creating an electric reaction.)", "It's not involuntary - It just helps you cope with the sour" ]

[ "Your brain actually tries to forget dreams. Most people have more than three per night, and forget most of them. If you wake up during a dream, your brain hasn't had time to try to forget it. Partially forgotten dreams, either by waking up before the memory has faded or by the mind failing to completely forget it, will seem much duller than a fresh dream." ]

[ "Ethyl alcohol sold as rubbing alcohol is denatured. Meaning it's mixed with poisonous and disgusting tasting substances to make it undrinkable. The additives are also selected to ensure that it's difficult to purify the alcohol with distillation.", "People do. However, in some locations, such as the United States, it is treated with additives to make imbibers ralph it up, spit it out, or otherwise not want to drink much of it.", "Stores will not sell you ethyl alcohol unless it has been denatured, (unless you are over 21 and buy PGA in a liquor store). It is denatured by adding enough other ingredients that you would become sickened if you drank it. \n\nYou can get drunk on rubbing alcohol, and go blind. Do not do it." ]

[ "I like to think of OSS developers as in two categories\n\n1 - People actually EMPLOYED to do work, and are legally obligated to submit their work back into the OSS source tree for whatever reason\n\n2 - Weekend Warriors, College Kids or Bored Teenagers with nothing to do and kind of \"get off\" on seeing people use their creation and commit something to the greater good. They like solving complex problems, and doing something cool that others can use is a great feeling", "Some FOSS developers do get paid, in fact most of the biggest open source projects (Linux, Firefox, KDE/GNOME, all those) are pretty much created by developers who get paid by a company who has an interest in using the software for its product. Take Linux for example, it's probably the most deployed kernel for servers amongst other things. Big companies who sell server hardware will want their features (such as a fancy new driver for some beasty bit of hardware they've made) built-into Linux, so they will donate a big lump to the Linux foundation in return for them accepting their patch/feature.\n\nNow, the guys who don't get paid. This is a hard one, as obviously everyone does it for different reasons. But I know people who swear by free software and believe it's their ethical responsibility to help better it and spread it more. Some people aren't world-class programmers yet, and are happy to make software for free just for the experience, and will open source it just to get more eyes on it (for constructive criticism). Some people just like writing code, and it's far easier for them to do it by contributing to an open source project than starting their own (maybe they've got writer's block and can't think of what to make next). \n\nOne of the best ways to contribute to open source code isn't necessarily features, but simply having an eye on the code and pointing out bugs (and hopefully supplying a fix). Again some people do this for all the above reasons. \n\nTL;DR, the same reason anyone does anything else for free. To help, and for fun. \n\nEDIT: In regards to your second question. Most unpaid FOSS developers will have a real job. One of the best examples I can think of was Con Kolivas, who wrote a big patchset for the Linux kernel, that was optimised for 'desktop use' such as multimedia/gaming. He did this in his spare time without much in the way of programming qualifications. His day job was... I think, an aneasthetist... Or a paramedic. I forget.", "Many reasons:\n\n* The joy of creation (why do people build model airplanes?).\n* To learn a new skill (for fun or potential profit later).\n* To contribute to a piece of software that he or she believes in.\n* To add desired but missing functionality that may benefit others.\n* To be a part of the community that supports that software.\n* For the challenge.\n\nRegarding support, it is likely that the majority of open source contributors are employed outside of the \"open-source industry\".", "Generally people who do any kind of volunteer work or free labor are motivated by their ideology or values and not remuneration, and they're either financially independent (they don't have to work for money) or they just do it in their free time, after their day job. So computer-people who write open-source software generally want to improve the software and provide it for free to people so that everyone can enjoy the thing they have. Think about it. People go to dig wells in rural drought-stricken villages in Kenya not because they want to get paid, they just want the locals to finally enjoy clean water without having to hike miles a day to get it.", "If you are working on software project X(paid or personal) and you are using open source library Y then you may come across issue Z. After finding a solution to Z and are proud of it then you can submit your solution to the community. A way to payback to the community.", "Well, many people do things for the sake of enjoyment or as a base for their portfolio.\n\nHowever, from a personal standpoint, these people were infected at a young age with badassery and the open source code is just a symptom." ]

[ "Your perspective is limited by the thoughts you can think with the knowlege you already have. Think of a spotlight pointed at the ground at night. The main body of light is your current t knowlege. The outside aura of light are new connections you could possibly make with your current knowlege. Books expose you to thinking in new ways and very in-depth knowlege of other people. Because of the slow rate of reading you have plenty of time to absorb lots of information. I also have heard many times that watching something on a screen bypasses parts of your brain and you more readily accept the information as true without first questioning it against your current base of knowlege. Not sure what truth is in this but it seems somewhat accurate due to personal experience." ]

[ "Bing is actually excellent at certain things. But my interest in it is usually short-lived.", "Google has the first to market advantage. During the 90s there were hundreds and hundreds of search engines that were receiving big giant corporate bucks. When it was found that their user base wasn't responding to advertisement models properly they all folded and Google bought out any of them with decent technology.\n\nTo that end, Google is an amalgamation of all the hard work of 100 search engines rolled into one. All the widgets have been very important in their success. Their being able to incorporate _URL_0_, Wikipedia, and other sources as widgets has made them a class act (although their is a law suit fighting exactly what they're doing there).\n\nBing is a second to market alternative. Much like Google's older competitors it doesn't actually matter how many users it has. If you search \"Mount Everest\" into Bing and Google you get identical results. I don't simply mean identical as in same pages. I mean the format is exactly the same. They both have a side widget from Wikipedia. They both have the same top ten web sites. They both have Images plasted in the middle of search terms.\n\nWhen you offer a service that is exactly the same, first to market always has the advantage... especially when both services are free.\n\nGoogle+ and Facebook are essentially the same thing. Google+ in some ways offers better service than Facebook to due its mass integration with Google's network. But since Facebook was first to market it is more relevant. Services like Snapchat and Twitter have more active users than both services (although far less) because those services offer something different." ]

[ "What makes you think that the container filled with hydrogen \"weighs less\" than the vacuum one? Weight is a result of gravity, which depends on mass. The container filled with hydrogen has more mass than the one filled with \"nothing,\" and thus weighs more.\n\nedit: and they weigh the same regardless of where they are; at the surface of the water, underwater, not in water at all, whatever.\n\nsecond edit: I think your confusion might be from the fact that a hydrogen balloon rises in air, which makes you think it \"weighs less.\" A \"vacuum-filled\" balloon would also rise in air. A balloon floating is a result of buoyancy, just the medium is air instead of water.", "Container filled with vacuum will be more buoyant than the same container filled with anything. \n\nHowever, containers that hold vacuum need to be reinforced with steel and whatnot. It would be better to use less sturdy materials and make a lighter box filled with hydrogen than make a very heavy box that could hold a vacuum." ]

[ "Yes! Well, if you're a network engineer, it will be easier. And it will also be easier now, rather than when they built the first one, because all the software has already been written.\n\n1. If you have a **simple** **network** at home, it doesn't really need to be connected to the Internet for the computers to talk to each other, and within just a handful of computers, it will work fine.\n\n2. However, as you connect more and more computers, it will get more complicated, and you'll have to re-invent the things the Internet does. For example, in your home network, the only thing deciding where the packets go is your ethernet switch. These can't handle particularly large networks. Eventually, you'll need **routing**, where you assign particular addresses to particular parts of the network -- for example, 1.*.*.* is your house, and 2.*.*.* is your neighbor's house, and routers will know where the packet should go based on the address.\n\n3. As you connect more and more computers, you may not be managing the whole network yourself. Other people will be managing their own networks, and you will be **internetworking** between them, i.e. connecting networks together. For example, your network is in house **A** and is connected to house **B**. And house **B** is connected to house **C**, but you don't know that! Your neighbor in B needs some way to tell you that it can get packets to C for you. On the Internet, the thing that does that is called **BGP**, or \"border gateway protocol\". It helps networks managed by different groups to work together. Now you have **a** **internet**. (Not **The** **Internet**, though.) \n\n4. Eventually it will be hard to keep track of numbers, so you'll want names for things, like _URL_0_, and a way to turn that into numbers. This is **domain** **registrars**, to keep track of who is in charge of each domain, and **domain** **name** **system**, to actually change those various names into numbers.\n\nAs I said, you can borrow the programs to manage that from the ones the real Internet uses -- most are free -- but you could also make your own versions that work differently. And obviously, you'll need to buy a whole lot of fiber or cable of some sort, depending on how big you want it!", "Connect two computers with a network cable. Bam! Your very own personal Internet!", "Sure, you could, assuming you've got the time/knowledge/resources. Although you'd have a lot of work ahead of you if you wanted to achieve the same level of functionality of the current internet, given how many people have spent a ton of time and money building it." ]

[ "Not true at all. Even if saliva can remove blood (it can, but so can water), whether or not it comes from the same source as the blood makes absolutely no difference.", "It's not just your own, but saliva in general has a lot of enzymes that will break down molecules in blood. So it's the enzyme action that does it." ]

[ "When you eat it it gets processed by your liver into 11-hydroxy-THC. Which is said to be 5 times more psychoactive than when you smoke or vaporize cannabis.", "The active ingredients in smoke get absorbed directly into your bloodstream inside your lungs. The active ingredients in edibles have to be digested before they can have an effect. Not everything digests at the same speed or as efficiently, but what you breathe is all absorbed at the same time. \n\nSo the effect of smoke is faster and you get all the different compounds at once, whereas with edibles it's slower and different psychoactive compounds hit your brain at different times." ]

[ "Because\n\n1. The statute of limitations for the crimes Cosby is accused of has passed. \n2. Because given the length of time between the acts and now, there is little chance of there being enough evidence to prove his guilt \"beyond a reasonable doubt.\"", "Everyone is entitled to due process. In this case, many of the accusations are quite old. We have statutes of limitations on many crimes because it's not...exactly fair to have a 30 year old crime suddenly pop up. Not to mention that it becomes so much more difficult to prove in court.\n\nI am **not** saying he's innocent or that he doesn't deserve to go to jail (or the opposite, for that matter...that's a different topic). It's just that he *does* get to have a trial, and given that these accusations are so old, it's challenging for the courts to ensure a fair and accurate trial. In addition, Bill Cosby is famous, and that always complicates things. Most people have already heard about it, and have already formed in many cases very strong opinions about it. We want to make sure he has a fair trial, so we don't want the jury to be full of people who *already* think he should go to jail before hearing the facts as they're presented in court. But we also want the accusers to have a fair chance at justice, so we also don't want to fill the jury with people who already think he's innocent. Ideally, you'd have a jury of people who haven't formed an opinion yet...but that means people who aren't familiar with the topic...which is not really easy to find. And our justice system is predicated on \"innocent until proven guilty\", so if Cosby can't have a fair trial, the default is \"not guilty\" so he doesn't go to jail.\n\nAnd, let's face it, being famous has other perks. A lot of information has been coming out that many people in the industry have known about Cosby's behavior for a while, but did not act. He's got a lot of influence, so no one wanted to be on his bad side by making the accusation. You might suddenly find that your Hollywood career has disappeared and no studios will hire you. Today, that's less of an issue, but he still has a lot of money and influence, which makes it a little more challenging. Again, we have to be fair: we have to be sure that he's *not* influencing the trial in any way, or that others aren't being biased because they *dislike* his money and power, or trying to get him in jail as a ploy to take away his money and power. Ridiculous? Yeah, but within the realm of possibility, so we have to be careful. And again, the default is \"not guilty\".\n\nIt's a big complicated mess of an issue, which is very unfortunate because the victims do deserve justice. But the world is not always a kind place and not everyone gets justice.", "the statute of limitations has expired. a statute of limitations states the maximum amount of time after a crime is committed during which someone can be charged. it exists to stop the government from trying to control people by giving ultimatums about charges." ]

[ "That's ridiculous. Irish is a nationality. They might say those kids aren't Irish because they don't have the right accent it don't follow the traditions, it happens in all closed communities, but they are as Irish as the taoiseach (current or past). It has nothing to do with race.", "Irish is a nationality and ethnicity (which is more narrow than race -- one could be Caucasian from Ireland, US, Sweden, France, etc.)... your sister's kids could hold Irish nationality but still would not be Irish ethnically. They don't have Irish blood since your sister, your parents, etc. were not Irish.\n\nSimilarly, if somebody from Japan moved to the U.S. their kids would be American by birth, but their ethnicity would still be Japanese." ]

[ "The answer is extremely simple: a modest number of total calories per day. (Often combined with a decent amount of exercise through work, walking, and/or cycling.)\n\nNo matter what *kind* of food you eat, if the *total calories consumed* don't exceed the number you burn, you cannot get fat.", "This is a loaded question. You are dangerously assuming that carbohydrates are the overarching cause of weight gain.\n\nThis point of view has been a little irritating in recent years with so many popular diets being \"anti-carb,\" yet all carbohydrates, fats and proteins are NOT equal by any means. Consider that vegetables are the most nutrient-dense food on the planet, but they are consisted mostly of carbs. Consider that for hundreds of thousands of years, our most recent primate ancestors have subsided on mostly carbohydrate-based diets. And consider that carbohydrates are our body's most immediate source of energy before anything else; then fats and then proteins as the worst.\n\nWhen people say \"carbs are bad,\" they are typically referring to white, processed sugars found in candies and baked goods, white flour, denatured carbohydrates where all the fiber, vitamins, minerals, etc. have all been removed. This is dangerous because food is only healthy because of the vast complexity of nutrients that it offers, yet when you concentrate some of the most potent and powerful parts and remove all of the live enzymes, antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, and so on, weight gain is just one chronic illness that can easily ensue.\n\nYou cannot say that \"carbs are bad\" or will cause weight gain without further investigating and understanding what types of carbs you are referring to. Does that mean that all fats are good or bad? Or all proteins? What about the fat in raw, golden flax seeds -- is that fat even in the same ballpark as a pan of bacon grease?? No it is not. How about the sugar in a packaged candy bar or the sugar in a carrot or a beet? \n\nSaying that a carb is good or bad is like asking if a computer is good or bad? You need a lot more information to make that determination. How old is the computer? What are its specifications? Was it taken care of and maintained? What TYPE of computer are we even referring to -- a monster gaming computer or a 10 year old's iPad or my grandmother's ancient desktop that is only ever used to send an e-mail to her family?", "this is not correct observation, new generation of Chinese children have problems with obesity on par with US if not worse, it's not really genetic, but diet depending\n\nlook at average size of North and South Korean, after few decades of lack of resources are North Koreans significantly lower, not because of genetics\n\ni lived in China and there are plenty of fat people everywhere around or looking much older than they are, half of classmates of my wife look 10 years older, nothing like this happening in West\n\nalso rice is not really that popular in northern part of China" ]

[ "People still have to enter and exit this section unless they are to stay in it eternally. Traffic speeds and slows from congestion (as in, not accidents) purely from people making adjustments to change lanes. \n\nConsider that the range of speeds people travel down a highway doesn't vary that much normally. The thing affecting them is this merging." ]

[ "Most babies you see on TV are actually a lot older than you think. Most are at least a few months old.", "Casting agencies. Note, that those newborn babies you see on TV generally aren't newborn babies, unless you are watching a show that is putting a lot of focus on a premature baby in which case they often use dolls. Most 'newborns' on TV are actually a few months old already. \n\nThere are a few shows that use actual newborn babies. Call The Midwife is one. They constantly have to find new babies to use though, because they can only film them for three days before they are 'too old'.", "As stated before, casting agencies provide babies that are a bit older, but they specifically look for twins and triplets. Filming reculations are VERY restrictive on how long infants can \"work\" - in California, babies up to 6 months old can be on set for two hours with just 20 minutes of filming - so it's helpful to have a couple identical babies on hand to switch places so more footage can be shot per day.\n\nAs for looking truly \"newborn,\" the babies are covered in a mixture of cream cheese and jelly to simulate amniotic fluid." ]

[ "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 £100 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 £1.\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.", "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." ]

[ "The website for the company that makes them has a pretty good explanation. Basically what happens is you have four types of light sensors in your eye: red, green, and blue cones plus rods. Their affinity to register light of different frequencies is shown [here](_URL_0_), which basically means that a photon at 420 nm is very likely to set off a blue cone and less likely to set off a rod, while a photon at 500 nm will likely set off a rod but almost certainly won't set off a blue cone. (Note that the responses are normalized, which means that you shouldn't compare the actual heights of the different curves, just the shapes.) When the different colors of cones fire you see different colors, and when the rods fire you see white. When you see yellow it's because both your red and green cones are firing at the same time--every different color you can perceive corresponds to a different ratio of different types of cones firing. (Extra credit: that means that each monochromatic visible light of a different wavelength looks like a different color, but there's lots of ways to *combine* different frequencies to make the same color.) The rods are mostly used in dim light, so bright white light is caused by all the types of cones firing about the same amount.\n\nNow, colorblindness. The issue with red-green colorblindness is that instead of having different frequency responses, the red and green cones have about the same frequency response in colorblind people. That means that any light causes them to fire the same amount, which makes red and green both look yellow. The glasses take advantage of the fact that the frequency responses still aren't exactly the same--they just overlap much more than they're supposed to. The glasses use nonlinear effects to make light with wavelengths shorter than 550 nm have even shorter wavelengths, and light with wavelengths longer than 550 nm have even longer wavelengths. That means light that should normally stimulate the green but not red cones, when passed through the glasses is shifted far enough towards blue that it really does stimulate the green cones more than the red (and similarly with light that should normally stimulate just the red cones)." ]

[ "You've sort of got it the wrong way round. The camera LENSES are round, because round lenses bend light much better. But the film the image is captured on is rectangular, for the same reason that all pictures are usually rectangles, easier to frame and they are easier to put onto walls.\n\nModern camera sensors have just continued this. Also when light is bent by a round lens, the images around the edges are often distorted, by using rectangle sensors you are just cropping these out and getting a better image.", "There is a square area at the back of the camera that opens and exposes the film when the shitter is released, with digital the mirror lifts up when you press the shutter, and a square digital photo sensor is exposed. The aperture only lets in light and the image, what goes on the film/sensor is the final square insane", "Lenses are round, because round glass elements transmit light the best and provide the clearest image out the other end.\n\n(Most) apertures are round because round apertures work well in round lenses, and also provide pleasant looking results in photos. A [square aperture would cause square shaped blurry objects in out of focus areas in the shot](_URL_0_) which is distracting and somewhat unpleasant. \n\nA round lens puts out a cone-shaped beam of light that resolves the image into a circle behind the lens, and then the sensor/film that captures the light is rectangular shaped, and sits in the center of that image circle. \n\nImages are shaped the way they are because of roll film, generally. A circular piece of film/sensor would technically capture more area out of the total projected image circle, but it's hard to make a roll of circles that tie together the way that a roll of rectangular frames of film does. They're also a lot harder to print and display. \n\nThe outside edges of the projected image circle also suffer from vignetting and issues with diffraction and fine detail, and generally the crop provided by the rectangular film/sensor inside of that image circle crops out the best portion of the image, and leaves the dark/blurry/aberrant portion of the image." ]

[ "They have a large area, large exploitable population, lots of natural resources, and are politically stable.", "They have the single largest land mass in South America, the single largest and most fertile river basin in the world, natural resources of just about every kind, it has been stable for decades without a coup and is the second largest population in the Western Hemisphere." ]

[ "When you breathe in through your nose you're filtering the air before it goes into your lungs, and pulling it through a smaller opening, forcing you to inhale slower taking deeper breaths. You exhale through your mouth because it's a bigger opening and you want to get the 'bad air' out as fast as you can. \n\nYour nose also helps regulate the temperature of the air you're breathing. When it goes in your mouth it goes very quickly into your lungs, and if it's too cold it can be jarring to your lungs. I'd guess, when it's way too hot out, like today, it also serves to cool it down a bit." ]

[ "Well nothing immediately. But obviously each member state would be more vulnerable to attack, with a particular problem to the Eastern European countries." ]

[ "AHT\tAnchor Handling Tug\n\nAHTS\tAnchor Handling Tug Supply vessel\n\nCRV\tCoastal Research Vessel\n\nC/F\tCar Ferry\n\nCS\tCable Ship\n\nDB\tDerrick Barge\n\nDEPV\tDiesel Electric Paddle Vessel\n\nDLB\tDerrick Lay Barge\n\nDCV\tDeepwater Construction Vessel\n\nDSV\tDiving Support Vessel/ Deep Submergence Vehicle\n\nDV\tDead vessel[1]\n\nERRV\tEmergency Response Rescue Vessel[citation needed]\n\nFPSO\tFloating Production, Storage and Offloading Vessel\n\nFPV\tFree Piston Vessel\n\nFPV\tFishery Patrol Vessel\n\nFV\tFishing Vessel\n\nGTS\tGas Turbine Ship\n\nHLV\tHeavy lift vessel\n\nHSC\tHigh Speed Craft\n\nHSF\tHigh Speed Ferry\n\nHTV\tHeavy Transport Vessel\n\nIRV\tInternational Research Vessel\n\nISV\tInternational Space Vehicle\n\nLB\tLiftboat\n\nLNG/C\tLiquefied natural gas carrier\n\nLPG/C\tLiquefied petroleum gas carrier\n\nMF\tMotor Ferry\n\nMS (M/S)\tMotor Ship (interchangeable[citation needed] with MV)\n\nMSV\tMultipurpose support/supply vessel\n\nMSY\tMotor Sailing Yacht\n\nMT\tMotor Tanker\n\nMV (M/V)\tMotor Vessel (interchangeable[citation needed] with MS)\n[citation needed]\n\nMY\tMotor Yacht\n\nnb\tNarrowboat\n\nNRV\tNATO Research Vessel\n\nNS\tNuclear Ship\n\nOSV\tOffshore Supply Vessel\n\nPS\tPaddle Steamer\n\nPSV\tPlatform Supply Vessel\n\nRV\tResearch Vessel\n\nRMS\tRoyal Mail Ship or Royal Mail Steamer\n\nSB\tSailing Barge\n\nSS (S/S)\tSteamship (with screw propellers, can be either coal- or oil-\nfired)\n\nSSCV\tSemi-Submersible Crane Vessel\n\nSSV\tSailing School Vessel, Submarine and Special Warfare Support \nVessel[2]\n\nST\tSteam Tug\n\nSTS\tSail Training Ship\n\nSTV\tSail Training Vessel or Steam Turbine Vessel\n\nSV\tSailing Vessel\n\nSY\tSailing Yacht or Steam Yacht\n\nTEV\tTurbine Electric Vessel\n\nTIV\tTurbine Installation Vessel\n\nTS\tTraining Ship\n\nTSS\tTurbine Steam Ship or Twin Screw Steamer\n\nTV\tTraining vessel\n\n\nthere are also prefixes for certain countries (USS would be United States Ship, FS is French Ship, JDS is Japan Defense Ship, HMS is His/Her Majesty's Ship/Submarine, ect)", "HMS - His/Her majesty's ship - British Royal Navy\nUSS - United states Ship - US Navy\nSS - Steam Ship - not necessarily powered by steam, designation for Us merchant ships \nEach country has their own traditional ship designations. NATO also has designations for Navy ships from all nations", "LE stands for Long Éireann or Irish Ship.", "Question: isn't the difference between a boat and a ship classified by the way that it makes a turn?", "Unless I'm mistaken, there used to be a naming convention by *types* of ships too in the US Navy. For example, battleships were named after states, carriers were named after presidents, submarines were named after fish, etc.\n\nI don't know how strictly this was followed or how long this went on, though.", "HMCS Stands for Her(His) Majesty's Canadian Ship. \n\nIn Britain it's the same without the \"Canadian\"" ]

[ "In the US, people tend to think everyone in congress is a bunch of idiots...except their guy. The guy they voted for is the one voice of reason trying to find common sense solutions and everyone else is out for themselves.", "Everyone wants their voters to think the other guy os truely awful when the reality is that everyone is merely meh. Republicans aren't AS bad as you have been lead to believe, and so it isn't THAT hard for people to convince conservative voters that Democrats are worse. Everyone sucks a little, so you play up your strengths and play up your oppenents flaws.", "I'm going to narrow it down to three things - memory, fear of change, and gaming the system. \n\nFirst, memory. It's a powerful thing. Baby Boomers have a vague childhood memory of the '50s as a golden time, and Republicans play on that with talk of 'traditional American values' guaranteed to make people of this age conjure up memories of mom in an apron, hot apple pie - basically a '50s sitcom version of real life, where everyone pledges Allegiance to the flag, says their prayers at night, lawns are perfectly green and manicured, and all the picket fences (and people) are white. \n\nThe dark side of this is the fear of change - basically everything that doesn't represent the Golden Times is bad. Black people are all out to get you by either through literally stealing your wallet or taking your tax dollars for welfare, which they then use to buy steaks and 40s and sit around laughing about how they don't have to work because they have a wallet full of your taxes. Those filthy 'Mexicans' all smoke that marijuana and if they're not mowing our lawns and cleaning our pools like good little racial stereotypes, they should all be sent back to Mexico. All those whores who can't keep their legs together want your money to pay for birth control so they can keep being whores.\n\nNow that they've cemented an ideal, and demonized everything that doesn't represent that ideal, they hedge their bets by gaming the system: gerrymandering districts so that Republicans outnumber democrats in as many districts as possible, reducing voting precincts in poor areas, making it difficult for the working poor to vote on breaks from work, putting voting precincts in unsafe neighborhoods, putting voting precincts far from transit lines, requiring ID to vote, harassment in voter lines, not to mention literally hacking voting machines to cast votes unintended by the voter.", "I can't stand the republicans, but I don't think it's at all accurate to say they're terrible leaders. They represent the people who vote for them, and respond in a way that a portion of the population wants them to respond. If they didn't think shutting down the government would get them more votes in November, they wouldn't shut it down. The fact that, according to polling, Americans agree with Democrats on the issues, yet the Republicans continue to control congress suggests that they are actually much better leaders than the Democrats.", "1) people in government are not supposed to be leaders. Members of the legislative branch are called Representatives because they are supposed to represent, aka follow, the views of their constituents. \n\n2) shutdowns are not per see a sign of bad representation so much as a sign of deep disagreements.", "Because poor people can't vote. With the gerrymandering,license,conviction rates,they have essentially taken most people out of the voting booth. Then you have conservatives telling thier Churches poor people are bad and if they don't take a stand the drug addicted miscreants will rob and kill them." ]

[ "To be clear, your first year of residency is referred to as 'internship,' and yes, you are paid. You are a doctor, and you are expected to see patients in the hospital and clinic, and do whatever else physicians in your specialty do on a day-to-day basis (operate, catch babies, whatever). You're supervised by older residents and by your staff to help you avoid fucking up too badly.\n\nYou also read and study a ton, attend classes and conferences, take outside training as needed in your specialty, take exams, teach younger residents and med students, etc and so on.\n\nBasically it's like working two full-time jobs (80 hr/week) plus taking a full college course load. Welcome to the Jungle." ]

[ "* They are a third set of molars at the back of your mouth.\n\n* They come in at around 18-20 years because before then, your mouth would be too small and there wouldn't be room for them\n\n* Sometimes they don't come in right because our mouths are smaller than they were 100,000 years ago, laregly because ever since this \"cooking\" thing started, we've had a lot less chewing to do.\n\n* The evolutionary purpose they serve was to be extra teeth to grind with. If you ever see hominid skulls from 100,000+ years ago, any that made it past 20-30 years had their teeth ground way, way down. That's because before cooking and relatively modern food processing (I'm talking about grinding grain to bake bread with), our diet required a lot of long periods of chewing. Teeth would wear down. If you got to the point where you had no more molars left, you basically would have starved. So having an extra four molars in your mouth, once your head was big enough to hold them, was an advantage.\n\nSource: Forensic Anthropology course in university", "There are already some people who simply don't have them. If we didn't have dentists and modern medicine in a few hundred years wisdom teeth would have disappeared, since most of the people that do have them would likely get infection before reproducing.", "Dunno what triggers but I do know that as our skulls have gotten smaller, they often don't have enough space to fully emerge. Which is why don't people have to have them removed.\n\nAs for usage, probably chewing stuff." ]

[ "An IP address is basically just like your normal address. Imagine I wrote my address like this\n\n > Nevada.Smalltown.Main Street.8\n\nThat's basically how an IP address works. It tells you to go to Nevada, then find Smalltown, then find Main Street, then look for number 8\n\nAnd as for a network mask: well, the one for my \"local\" network, my street, would be something like this\n\n > Nevada.Smalltown.Main Street.0\n\nWhere \"0\" means \"everything\". We never assign number 0 to any houses (or computers, for IP's). Essentially it says \"Everything under Nevada.Smalltown.Main Street is part of my local chunk of network\". Equally we could say \"Everyone in my town\" by using this instead:\n\n > Nevada.Smalltown.0.0\n\nWhich means \"Every house on every street in Nevada\". In theory you could also use something like Nevada.Smalltown.0.8, which means \"Every house with the number 8\", but in the real world with IP addresses there's no actual use for this\n\nNote that IP addresses are a little less literal than this example: if you have a row of 10 computers in an office, they won't necessarily (or even probably) have IP addresses x.x.x.1 to x.x.x.10: it's more about who the IP addresses \"belong\" to.\n\nSo, for example, my ISP might use the IP addresses 88.200.0.0 (eg everything starting 88.200....) this gives them around 65,000 addresses in that \"block\". So anyone looking for 88.200.1.1 will go to my IP address and ask them to send it to me", "An IP address is just that: an address. It is a way of identifying a computer on a network.\n\nBut, it's actually two addresses combined into one number. A *network* part and a *host* part. We split it this way to simplify communication. For example, for an IP address of 10.1.1.1 The \"10\" is the network part and the \"1.1.1\" is the host part. So if you are communicating with any computer that has an IP address of \"10.x.x.x\" your computer will assume you are trying to communicate with a device on the same network and will try to communicate using different methods than if it was communicating with a computer out of the network.\n\nOriginally, they designed different \"classes\" of IP addresses that split the IP address in different ways. Class A said the first *octet* (the first number) of the IP address was the network and the remaining three were the host (N.H.H.H). Class B said N.N.H.H and Class C said N.N.N.H.\n\nHowever, we soon realized this was too clunky so we came up with *subnets.* Subnets used network masks to arbitrarily split up an IP address into a network and host part.\n\nRemember that these numbers are actually 8-bit binary numbers. So 10.1.1.1 is actually 00001010.00000001.00000001.00000001\n\nA mask is simply a bunch of 1's on the left side, and a bunch of 0's on the other, for example: 11111111.00000000.00000000.00000000. The computer uses this to determine what part of the associated IP address is the network by lining them up:\n\n 00001010.00000001.00000001.00000001\n 11111111.00000000.00000000.00000000\n\nThe part of the IP address that lines up with the 1's is the network part (in this case 00001010, or 10 in decimal) and the part of the IP address that lines up with the 0's is the host part.\n\nOften times you will see a mask represented by a slash and a number ( /8 ). The number is simply how many 1's are on the left side. So the above address could be represented as 10.1.1.1/8" ]

[ "Art is meant to entertain. Because life has no definite purpose, art is created in order to help give life purpose, or at least take our minds off of life's lack of purpose. Almost anything can be considered an art.\n\nPaintings that depicts realistic looking scenes like landscapes and portraits do this in a very closed-ended way. That is, if it's a painting of a tree, there's really only one way to interpret that painting.\n\nHowever, abstract art like that of Pollack and all of the other artists you've mentioned, fill the void of existance in a more open-ended way. Their paintings are meant to inspire feelings just like any other painting, but the viewer has more of a choice in what feelings are being inspired because they have more choice in what they are seeing.", "Art is sometimes thought of as a way of saying something without explicitly stating it. Because of this, it requires an active participation on behalf of the viewer/reader/listener, which is why the appreciation of art is often highly subjective. A single work of art can mean many things for many people; however, if there is a single objective value that good art is judged by, it is the ability for a work of art to mentally and emotionally engage many different people in a complex way. This is different from, say, entertainment, which is designed to appeal to as broad an audience as possible by making it overly accessible. This often creates a dynamic where people who are used to the accessibility of entertainment find less accessible art forbidding and view it as \"pretentious\" (though in some cases this sentiment is perfectly valid).", "Like the others have said, art is a form of expression. But, for people like Pollock, Mondrian, and Rothko, the thing that made them so famous is that what they came up with was so unique for their time. Many of those famous artists made art that most people thought was hideous or wouldn't catch on, yet they still carried on expressing themselves in their own way. And, after awhile, their art became so popular that it impacted others' work in a huge way.", "Back in the day, we didn't understand much. Our artists were like magicians. they could make the bison we hunted appear on the wall. They told us that if we threw our spears at that, we would be able to do it in real life. How great is that?\n\nThen later on, we built cities. We didn't need the hunt, and we had intellegent people help us understand the world better. We had mythical beings in the heavens that helped us do almost everything. With the same history of the cavemen, who painted to ensure a good hunt, we started to paint, sculpt, and build houses in order to bring us that much closer to those gods. Eventually, philosophers invented mathmatics, and we realized the world works according to math. Our art (painting, sculpture and architechture) began to look at symmetry. They also began to be a permanent way of telling stories. In that sense, art became, not only the search for divinity, but a way to explain the human condition.\n\nMove ahead a thousand more years. Artists had been honing their trade for so long, it was a trade skill, same as masonry or cobbling. But it was different, and so much better. What you see now as a painting with a picture of Mary in a garden, or of Jesus with dirty feet, had symbolism. People who had trained their whole lives, and had schools, full of artists training to be as good as them, would spend years, making a painting that not only looked as good as real life, but had all the hidden stories we were used to seeing. Still, that base instinct of having the bison on the wall was present. Jesus with dirty feet was a way of showing divinity as common. Mary in a room with a closed door symbolized immaculate conception etc.\n\nSkip ahead now to the enlightenment. Philosophers had made discoveries of thought that we didn't know what to do with. How could we prove who we are? how do we know what we see is reality etc. Artists followed in these footsteps. Some, called impressionalists, sacraficed the ability to paint something that looked real, in order to show a snapshot of something, or to put it in a specific frame of time. Others thought that since painting isn't real, it doesn't need to be real. The depth of a painting was reduced, so it looked more like theatre. Some, called expressionalists, wanted to get the emotional content out of a scene. Instead of painting the picture as realistic, they painted it as what the emotion of the scene was. Angry things were jagged and bold. Sad things were emotive and droppy.\n\nThen someone invented the camera, and art went crazy. Now one could make something look exactly what it looked like, instantly and often. What was thousands of years making it with a brush was just told it had no meaning anymore. Now what is art? The last hundred years, put simply, were an explosion of experementation, trying to rediscover what art is.\n\nSome went to the past. Cubism was representative of african and assyrian styles, where you would take something two dimentional, and paint all sides of it as once, as if you were looking around something without having to move. Maybe it was the idea that you were putting paint on a canvas was art, so the abstract expressionalists would paint, emphasising that. Others thought that the idea of making the picture plane flatter and flatter (like theatre) was a process going towards pure art. Piet mondrian and others played with abstract geometric shapes, until one day, someone ended that movment by painting a canvas white and putting it on the wall. It was the 'flattest' picture plane available.\n\nPop artists made art accessable and common. Having threads to caravaggio and the jesus with dirty feet. Some treated it as novelty, painting the same landscapes the northern europeans had done in the 17th century, with it's appeal being a skill that people don't have, but can appreciate. Some decided that art was dead, and reflected that in their art. they were around the second world war, and the idea that mankind would annihilate itself was real, and the art reflected that. They were dadaists. They eventually turned into surrealists, painting the same realistic scenes that were done before, but turning what we think of as reality on it's head.\n\nSo what is art? The honest answer is, we don't know, but so long as we call it art, it is art. Life was much simpler a hundred years ago, when we had art, and it always had this one magic idea; we can show you the world you see around you. Now it's a journey of discovery, taking the ideas from every human endeavour, and attempting to put it on a canvas, into clay, onto a piece of welded metal, or even in the shape and size of a building.", "I'm no expert but ill throw in my 2 cents. Jackson Pollack, Piet Mondian, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline have been deemed abstract expressionists which indeed does deal to a degree with self-expression. But abstract expressionism is a subcategory of Modernism, a movement whose motivation was to extend beyond the limitations of realism in art. All art is essentially a giant conversation and modernism was a period of reflection on the question What is essential to art? This was the main impetus of Piet Mondrian especially. \nThe thing is their is still no qualified definition of what art is and is not. Many aesthetic philosophers have attempted with expressionist theories, art is defined by the expression and transmission of pure emotion (Leo Tolstoy, R. G. Collingwood), formalist theories, art is defined by the quality and beauty of its formal aspects (Clive Bell), but not one theory has either sufficed. THey have either been too limiting or too expansive and there are always new exceptions to a previous theory. Kandinsky, one of the first abstract expressionist said it best in Concerning the Spiritual in art, \"Theory is the lampshade which sheds light on the petrified ideas of yesterday and of the more distant past.\" Their is one philosopher that believes to even have a definition of art is impossible and destroys creativity. \nSo the value of art now days i would think takes into account the history of art, and the context of the art and tries to determine a meaning. what was the purpose for this creation? This meaning is either valuable or pointless and this is what determines whether an artwork is regarded as special or not. \nHaving said that, I have no idea why Jeff Koons is so popular.\n\ntl;dr:there is no good definition to determine what is art and what is not. One must determine meaning given the history and context of the art and judge if that is valuable or not.", "Ok. Art. Like you're 5. \n\n\nArt is what happens inside you when you look at something. \n\nOften this is about the push or pull between your feelings and your mind. Sometimes they both like things, sometimes your mind likes something but your feelings don't. Sometimes it's the other way round. It's confusing and that's what it's supposed to be. \n\nPollack, Mondrian, and Rothko, I think they slow down your mind and make it think slower, because instead of your mind saying, \"It's a house!\", your mind has to think about what you're looking at for a much longer time. Also, they make you think about colour as an alive thing. Rothko worked very hard choosing his colours and the size of his pictures so that the colour would make you feel, and feel a lot. \n\nJeff Koons' art is taking stuff you think is normal or boring and making it weird and unusual. I think he's trying to make your brain say, \"Hey, I know what that is, sort of, but it's all different and I don't really understand it now.\"", "I think what's universal in all art is that it's trying to make you feel something.", "Art is using something (like paints, or sounds, or words) to share emotions.", "We know what art is! It's paintings of horses!" ]

[ "It's because of the \"first past the post\" method of determining the winner. Whoever gets the most votes wins, rather than the candidate having to secure a simple majority of 50% plus one. Third parties end up skewing the results and acting as \"spoilers\". There have been successful third parties — the Republican Party, for one. There's also the matter of the two main parties doing everything they can to keep viable third party candidates off the ballot or handicapped in one way or another. Ranked choice voting is one solution to this rather undemocratic feature of our system.", "There has been. The Republican party was created as a 3rd party with the goal of abolishing slavery. Back then, the two main parties were the [Whig](_URL_0_) and the Democrat party.", "_URL_1_\n\nThis is a cgpgrey video that my ap gov teacher used to explain your question.", "[Here](_URL_2_) are some previous posts that touch on the same question.", "More or less a big enough third party just ends up taking over one of the existing parties, there has been some MAJOR changes in what the parties are over time, at first the republicans were the liberal left party and the democrats were the conservative right party. But there has been several turn overs where different groups took over each party that ended up flipping everything. A third party will come up again at some point likely but ultimately just end up being the new face of the already named and existing parties.", "Good answers here, but another thing no one has mentioned is a lot of third parties are single issue parties, so one of the big two will end up absorbing the third one and use that to boost their votes", "There is a very simple principle in political science known as Duverger's Law which explains why this happens.\n\n_URL_3_\n\nThe problem is not simply plurality voting, because even with proportional representation, if the race is for one seat representing one district (in legislature, since these are the most frequent and arguably most important elections), even if a party has pockets of regional support, by spreading themselves too thin geographically, they lose traction on a national level. Therefore, the larger and more established parties, those who have more national appeal, can retain their stranglehold by appealing to more people in more districts (the article cites the green party in Canada and the Liberal Democrats in the UK as examples). So in America, where every single election (including that of President) is broken down to the district level, our two main parties focus their efforts of winning each particular district. With more name recognition and resources, this is easier for them. This is also why, in state and local elections, the local chapters of each party will give an \"official endorsement\" of the candidate they think is most likely to win overall, even if there are multiple candidates from that party. \n\nSecondly, politics has always been a mix of statistics and sociology. Consider it like this, if you have 100 moderates and 80 radicals voting for one seat, but there are two moderate candidates and one radical candidate, unless moderate voters can agree on one candidate, the radical will win; because of vote splitting. However, the radical voters actually tend to comprise less than 44% of the voting constituency, therefore, both parties have tended to gravitate more towards the middle rather than the outlier. They do this to attract undecided voters and those unsatisfied with their last choice of elected official. Smaller parties tend to move farther away from the middle, attracting only those who fit a specific viewpoint. On the basic level, they capture less of the vote already, but since voters know that smaller parties have a slim to zero chance of victory, a vote for them is considered a waste by almost everyone. This is the most common explanation offered for why a third party is so unsustainable in the US.\n\nThere are so many reasons it would be hard to explain to a five year old why it works out this way. The most basic answer is that the US uses an antiquated system for voter representation that stems from a time when actual representational democracy was unfeasible on such a large geographic scale. Now that we have such things as telephones, the Internet, planes, and automobiles, there is no reason that we should use a plurality voting system coupled with single member districts.", "It's because of the election system. It will always lead to two parties having monopoly on politics.\n\nNo one in power want to change it though, since that would give them another contender to compete with.\n\nCGP Grey explains it well.\n\n_URL_4_", "The two main political parties tend to adopt some of the marginally successful third party's platform in the next election, especially if they lost. Recent examples would be more Republicans going fiscal conservative and their \"Contract with America\" and recent \"Tea Party\" efforts winning seats in Congress after the fiscally conservative Ross Perot reaped millions of votes that likely would have went to George HW Bush in 1992. The Democrats have put the environment more prolific in their policy ideas in recent years, coincidentally after the Green Party candidate Ralph Nader received 97k votes in Florida in 2000.\n\nIdeologically, Americans tend to classify themselves as moderates, and many don't even affiliate with a political party anymore, in contrast to their European counterparts. The two main political parties are frankly just to the left and the right of center versus their more narrowly ideological counterparts (the Libertarians and Greens being the most popular in recent election cycles). Right now the candidates you see on TV during the primary season are fashioning themselves as more to the left or right on various issues because right now they need to secure the nomination from more ideological members/activists from within their own party. However, by the time summer rolls around you'll see the Dem and GOP picks go towards the center. Why? Because they will not be able to win the presidency on the party faithful alone, and so will fashion themselves as centrist to get the moderate independent voters.\n\nA combo of the two above- people considering themselves moderate plus actually knowing a bit about the \"third party spoiler\" issue cause a tremendous amount of voters doing what is known as \"the clothespin vote\" or \"picking the lesser of the two evils\". \n\nSay you really love almost everything the Libertarian candidate has to say- low government involvement in both the economy and social issues and is therefore in support of gay marriage, abortion if needed, marijuana legalization, right to gun ownership, and low taxes. Maybe his isolationist stance on foreign policy concerns you, because it ended up working so well for the US during the 20s and 30s in keeping us out of global conflicts, but whatever. But as much as you like the guy, you know you really don't want who has been picked as the Democratic candidate this year because of the greater restrictions and taxation ideas s/he has and ultimately you back down on supporting your ideal and support the \"better than the Democrat\" GOP candidate so as not to be the spoiler vote. It sucks but anecdotally (not to mention its explored in HS government and AP Gov curriculum) it is a major factor. People are pussies." ]

[ "Not quite 5, but I'll give it a shot.\n\nBlood type refers to the type of cell marker that exists on the outside of your red blood cells. There are 3 types- A, B, and O. If you have A, B is considered foreign so you will have anti-B antibodies. The same can be said for A if you have B type blood. If you have O, it is neither A nor B so you make antibodies for both A and B. AB blood types have no antibodies since both types are present on their cells. Type ABs are referred to as \"universal recipients\" because they have no antibodies in their blood and can therefore receive any type of blood without fear of the body rejecting it. Type Os are the universal donors under most condition but this can vary depending on other more complicated factors since as I mentioned before they have anti-A and anti-B antibodies.\n\nThese types are genetic. A and B are dominant to O, and if you get an A from one parent and a B from another, you will be AB (co-dominant).", "It's kinda like [this](_URL_0_), except when the right block goes through the right shaped hole, it gets stuck and you can't remove it from the box.\n\nYour own bloodtype has blocks that don't match your box, so they can't get stuck inside. Other bloodtypes, however, have blocks on their surface that WILL match your box, and WILL get stuck inside.\n\nType AB bloodtype has no boxes, and so can take blood from anyone. Type O has no blocks, so it isn't as much of a problem for them to donate blood to anyone else. Their box does match all blocks, but this doesn't detriment health too much, because generally, there are much more blocks present than there are boxes.", "I like Nuzzums' explanation, but let me give it a go.\n\nYour circulatory system is a club and all the people in there, red blood cells (RBCs), get a stamp on their hand. This stamp can be A or B or nothing at all. O is not a type, it's the absence of a type.\n\nThe antibodies are the bouncers, and they're checking for A, B, AB, or nothing. If they're looking for B (because that system is type B), then they spot check all the RBCs for the B stamp. If they've got at least a B, they're cool. That means they could see a cell with AB and be fine with it. If they're looking for B, but find A, they flip their shit, and start a ruckus. If they see nothing, well, those cells are too cool to even NEED stamps (it's like ladies' night).\n\nHowever, if the system is O, these antibodies are on the hunt to eliminate all the A's and B's. You better believe that AB is getting tossed out REAL quick because ANY antibody is going to find something it doesn't like.\n\nThis is why O is the best donor. It's like a lady in the club. No one wants to get rid of a lady. AB is the best club because everyone's welcome.\n\nThe positive and negative bit after that is a simpler system called the Rhesus factor. A (positive) system allows both (positive) and (negative), while a (negative) system only allows (negative).", "A few good answers so far about what blood type is, but are there any theories as to why our blood types are different?", "A good analogy is like gang colors.\n\nAn antibody checks your colors for opposition. If he sees both, he's not going to shoot because he can't be sure which side you're on.\n\nIf he sees neither, he'll assume you're neutral and leave you alone.\n\nIf he sees the the other side, he will commence the busting of caps (which means that he and about a thousand of his friends latch onto the offending cell for termination). Too many offending cells found can mean a jam and a clot. This means everything dies.\n\nActually, gang warfare is a pretty good analogy, IIDSSM.", "Blood is basically made out of 2 types of cells: red blood cells and white blood cells. The job of white blood cells is to help destroy foreign invaders to the body.\nThere are 4 basic blood types: A, B, AB, and O. Blood types A and B are covered in a protein (we'll call them A and B respectively) that helps the body identify itself. Blood type AB has both A and B proteins. Blood type O has no protein, which is why they call it the \"universal donor\". \nThis protein helps the white blood cells identify that the blood cells belong in the body. This is why you can only accept donations from certain blood types. When white blood cells find red blood cells with the incorrect proteins, they try to destroy them (they usually try and round them all up into a big clump of red blood cells that form a clot and block veins/arteries).", "Are these different blood types present in all other mammals or are humans unique in this aspect?", "Your blood can have three different things in it. Two of them are called A and B; O just means you don't have either of those. The third makes your type \"positive\" if you have it and \"negative\" if you don't.\n\nYour body won't take blood that has stuff that your blood doesn't. But it doesn't have to have everything your blood has. \n\nSo folks with a positive type can take negative blood, and folks with type A or B can both take type O. Everyone can accept \"O negative\" blood, which makes it very much in demand. Folks with blood type \"AB positive\" can accept anyone else's blood.\n\nN.B. not exactly ELI5, but for the binarily inclined, you can think of it as three bits:\n \n AB+ Type \n 000 O negative \n 001 O positive \n 010 B negative \n 011 B positive \n 100 A negative \n 101 A positive \n 110 AB negative \n 111 AB positive", "I skimmed the previous responses, which, overall, probably covered the basics. An interesting point, which a professor answered for me in an undergrad (or maybe grad) class, is if I am type A, why do I have antibodies to B if I was never exposed to B blood? (This applies for other markers we do not carry but would react immunologically to as well.) The answer is that bacteria (the cells of which, on or in our bodies, outnumber our own) carry antigens (markers) that are cross-reactive with our blood cell markers. BTW, the antigen does not always have to match the antibody/white cell receptor exactly to fit well enough to cause a reaction.", "Just a guess but for the \"Why is our blood different\" could be an evolutionary tactic for disease resistances.\n\n If a crop is made from one seed and not a mix of several seeds, it is easy for one disease to kill a whole crop.", "Speaking of which, what is the best way to get to know your blood type? From what I have heard, the take-home kits are unreliable, but I wouldn't mind knowing my blood type.", "Here's a cute little game that teaches a little about blood typing _URL_1_", "What happens if you give someone the wrong blood?", "Did someone watch The Walking Dead last night?" ]

[ "Well, I don't know about bone fractures. Most of the Pain - > Weather predictions I've seen have been about joint pain.\n\nThe most common explanation is that damaged joints respond to changes in atmospheric pressure. Rain, and especially large storms, are accompanied by a drop in pressure. That pressure drop causes damaged tissue (from arthritis, an injury, etc.) to swell up. The swelling tissue causes the joint to ache and alerts the person to the impending weather change.", "I'm not a doctor or anything near an expert but I think it's because of the air pressure and humidity levels changing, which may cause bones to expand or contract.\n\nJust a thought though. Maybe it'll give you a bit of insight" ]