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Why does Netflix make huge profit while Spotify doesn't?
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There are basically three music labels with a monopoly on the industry and they control pricing on music licenses and sales just like the OPEC group does with oil. Netflix does not have it easy by any means, that's why they are investing massive amounts of money into creating their own content.
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Netflix started as a subscription DVD service, which they still offer today. They gained the ability to negotiate for streaming content when they had already achieved success in the dvd rental marketplace, so the barrier to entry was eliminated by that point. For Pandora, music artists aren't paid much when music is streamed; but receiving some amount of money based on ad revenue was a welcome change from the rampant music piracy of the early 2000's. Pandora became more successful over the years as ad-supported music streaming increased in popularity. I'm sure someone else might have more actual stats, but hopefully this helps.
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Why did we evolve to go through puberty? Why don't we just come out ready to procreate?
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In complex foragers such as ancestral humans, it was important to have a development period in which the individual fine-tunes the techniques that will help him/her survive. If we entered into puberty right after birth, we wouldn't have had the time to establish our own lives and would most likely not have the resources to sustain ourselves, let alone a child.
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To put it in simple terms, that’s just part of mammals development into adulthood. Most everything ‘goes through puberty’ of some iteration. Even the transition past a larval state into adulthood can be thought of as puberty (obviously not ‘puberty’ per se, though)
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Why can you pass out from locking your kneecaps too long?
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You don't pass out from locking your knees too long. If your standing for a while like in a military formation, or in my case being in choirs, they say not to lock your knees in case you pass out. That way if you pass out, you drop straight down and don't fall over like a tree, hurting your self more and possibly knocking down others.
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Locking your knees reduces circulation and can cause gravitational blood pooling in your lower extremities. This can remove a large amount of oxygen from circulation, which could cause your brain to activate a sort of fail-safe by shutting down non-essential systems in order to keep your heart, lungs, and brain functional. This causes you to pass out. On a side note, I copy/pasted your question into Google, and two ELI5 posts popped up asking the same thing, as well as several medical websites answering this exact question.
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Pterosaurs are my favorite class of dinosaurs. Quetzalcoatlus had a wingspan of 40 feet and was the largest flying animal to ever live. Are there any theories on how it actually managed to achieve flight?
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Just by the way, Pterosaurs were not actually dinosaurs- they're a separate grouping. Both, however, are archosaurs, a group which also includes crocodiles.
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The blue whale, which still lives today, is the largest animal ever known to have existed. Elephants weigh more than *T. Rex* did. Also, not all dinosaurs were massive.
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standard deviations.
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Standard deviations add context to data. Is 20 a lot more than 10? If it's how fast your car is going right now, not at all. If it's how much you spent on lunch today, maybe. If it's how many times you peed yesterday, then, ya know, it might be time to see a doctor. Standard Deviations are what allow you to transform these into comparable situations - eg, Speed= +0.2 SD, Lunch= +1.1 SD, Bathroom= +3.8 SD. (There are good technical explanations on this thread already so I won't add one)
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Instead of IQ, suppose you had a population with an average weight of 100 pounds and a standard deviation of 15 pounds. You are asking a question like how many people weigh exactly 100.0000000000 pounds. The answer is going to be zero. You need to ask how many people are within 1 pound (or half a pound or 0.1 pounds) of 100 pounds. Then you can calculate the answer.
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Well I was sure I could remember my 10th grade chemistry classes after reading some pseudo-science article on canker that was saying to mix H2O2 with NaHCO3 with NaCl to cure them. Thought I could find how they combine together, I can't. How do I do it?
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[It actually isn't pseudoscience](_URL_0_). There aren't any simple reactions, there would likely be multiple reactions including an acid-base reaction between hydrogen peroxide and bicarbonate, and an equilibrium of carbonate and peroxocarbonate ions. The sodium and chloride ions are pretty happy to be not reacting with anything.
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Can you describe what reaction you're trying to make? Are you sure you don't mean cyclohexene?
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Why do kickers in Football have no problem kicking 75 yards in a kickoff, but struggle to even make it to the goal post on a 40 yard field goal?
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It is kicked a different way. During kick off, they are farther back and get more momentum. Additionally, with a field goal, the kicker has to worry about angling higher for the ball not to get blocked while on kick off they can angle it much lower.
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You cannot use a kicking tee on field goal attempts and you have to face the rush of the opposing team, so not really comparable to a kickoff. What could work in theory is a [Fair Catch Kick](_URL_0_) if the preceeding play was a fair catch.
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Why are records read from the outside in, and CDs/DVDs read from the inside out? Why did it change?
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Audio files stored on CDs sort of made it somewhat standard for cds to read inside out. Although seemingly rare, Cds did not come in standard sizes and data is sort of stamped in so you could use the same stamp for several sizes of CD. Circumference of a circle gets larger as the radius gets bigger so more of the disc passes by the read head at longer radius with the same amount of rotation. Things that needed speedy reading read from outside in like many game discs. To improve performance. This wasn't needed for music. Not really sure about records but I would guess it had to do with performance as speed of the read head would be faster and may improve audio quality at the edges.
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Some early vinyls did play inside to outside, but they found that people accidentally scratched the vinyl with the needle more frequently if they had to carry it over to the inside to start the album. CD/DVDs don't necessarily play from anywhere. Data is data. It can be printed anywhere on the disk and in almost any order, down to a certain level. CD/DVDs are agnostic about starting points after about a millisecond of spinning in the drive.
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What evidence is there for a non-antrophogenic global warming?
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There's plenty. The most prominent candidates for non-anthropogenic warming are the sun via direct effects, and then again the sun, via indirect effects such as cosmic rays. These effects do indeed contribute to the currently observed global warming, but not very much. The only serious argument in the AGW debate is now how much the individual contributions are. Genuine crackpots will try to convince you that anthropogenic causes are below the the 10% range and that the sun (and maybe ocean oscillations) contributes the rest. The more serious denialist scientists who want to keep some shred of credibility would probably claim 50/50 contribution. Real climate scientists place the anthropogenic contribution at currently [at least 74%](_URL_0_).
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Global warming is a gglobal phenomenon. You cannot judge the validity of the claim by just looking out your window. It's about global average temperatures over long time periods
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Was there an appreciable life expectancy difference between replacement soldiers in the US army during WWII and those that originally trained with a unit stateside?
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More can be written, but you might like to go through ["Can it be statistically proved that the 'inexperienced reinforcement' units for example in WW2 or other large long conflicts suffered casualties at a quicker / bigger rate than the veterans?"](_URL_0_) by /u/the_howling_cow . This is not to discourage discussion. More questions, data, and debate are welcome.
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u/no-tea's contrast of naval aircraft pilots is awesome, but the question on my (and I suspect, many others') mind is that of the *soldier*, as in actual riflemen enlisted in the various *armies*. There's a passage in All Quiet on the Western Front where someone who has been deemed unfit for duty is awaiting some paperwork to be shipped back home (and sadly, catches a piece of shrapnel while waiting), but what about the rest of the unit? Were squads/platoons/companies relieved and at least allowed to rest behind the lines or were they simply parked in the trenches until every last man succumbed to ~~PTSD~~ shell shock? I think OP is referring in terms of the length of deployments in the modern US service, where an enlistedman is posted to an active zone for a certain number of months/years, and then sent back home despite the continuation of hostilities.
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The book of Revelation talks about dragons, so Romans must have had some concept of dragons. Were they thinking of the same thing I think of?
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This isn't an answer to your question, but it might help getting you what you want. The book of Revelation was not written to Roman citizens, but to Christians. It was written by someone who would have identified himself as a Jewish follower of Christ. So perhaps the question should be addressed to historians who know the understanding of Dragons in Roman Providence of Judea. It would also be interesting to see the understanding of Dragons by the folks who lived in Roman providence of Asia where the letter John wrote was sent.
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There's always room for discussion, but perhaps the section [Here be dragons](_URL_0_) from our FAQ will answer your inquiry.
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Let's assume I'm a regular fish in the Pacific Ocean, what's keeping me from going to the bottom?
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It's cold, you might not be able to handle the pressure, and there's probably nothing down there for you to eat. As a fish, you would have no reason to go to the bottom of the ocean.
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Most fish don't live at the bottom of the ocean for this very reason. Fish live in various 'zones' most of which are relatively close to the surface, as you go deeper you find invertebrates (such as squid) that are better adapted to dealing with higher pressure. After a certain point though there is very little life.
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Black holes vs. white holes.
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> In general relativity, a white hole, is a hypothetical region of spacetime which cannot be entered from the outside; but matter and light can escape from it. In this sense, it is the reverse of a black hole, which can be entered from the outside, but from which nothing, including light, has the ability to escape I got this off of wikipedia
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The two black holes will revolve around each other until the event horizons collide. As they get closer to each other they orbit faster and faster until they completely collide and become one 'larger' black hole.
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What was the prevalence of royal "food testers" like in feudal europe?
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I just wanted to add that in Rome, the food taster would typically be a slave, the *praegustor*. So it wasn't really a cushy job given to a royal favorite or anything like that.
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Peasants in different regions had differing diets and nutritional deficiencies. A monotonous diet of rice, for example, would lead to beriberi. A diet of maize would cause pellagra. Low protein and low energy diets would cause marasmus and kwashiorkor. There is abundant evidence in historical record and texts like Deuteronomy that these clinical entities occurred in the past. [Source](_URL_0_) Having said that, historical diets weren't necessarily as terrible as you might think. If you get most of your calories from wheat, for example, or potatoes, you won't have any shortage of protein in your diet.
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What will happen if a caterpillar is prevented from making a cocoon in order to become a butterfly?
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There is a hormone in insects called Juvenile Hormone (JH) that controls metamorphosis. Basically, every time the larva molts, its body checks to see how much JH there is. While JH is high, it will stay immature and keep eating and growing as a larva. When JH levels suddenly drop, that is a signal that the caterpillar is ready to metamorphose into a pupa (cocoon), and then to an adult. However, there have been experiments done to see what happens if you artificially keep JH levels high, even after the insect is supposed to metamorphose. What happens is the caterpillar continues to eat and grow into a monstrous larva. Then, if JH ever drops, it can metamorphose into a monstrous version of the adult. But, if the caterpillar just never undergoes metamorphosis, it will probably keep growing until its organs (which evolved to work in a much smaller animal) cannot support its massive body properly, and then die.
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They make a cocoon. Inside that they liquify their body into a soup of organs and soupy organic substances. Then they re assemble them into a butterfly. Done.
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How could a large skyscraper in a densely populated area be demolished?
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Skyscrapers are dropped using a controlled demolition of key supports, in the center of the building. While it does create a big cloud of dust around the footprint of the building, the heavy debris collapses inward on itself, then straight down. Sorta like this: |==| building roof |-V-| building roof and center mass drops inward /__\ building walls follow center mass inward as well, then the whole mess tumbles straight down neatly.
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Controlled demolition after you gut it. Basically: - Strip out all the useful bits that you can sell off or reuse (cabling, ducting, carpet, light fixtures etc.) so that it's just an empty shell. - Place explosive charges on the main structural members, which are shaped and placed so that the force of the explosion is inwards (so it doesn't blow outwards into other buildings or far away). - Sequence the explosives so that they go off in controlled order. Basically, you want to blow the bottom out at several points so that the upper levels collapse straight downwards under the weight of gravity (pancaking). - Once the building is down, dispose and salvage of the material, e.g. structural steel (rebar) in concrete can be salvaged and sold for scrap recycling. The rest goes in landfill.
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Would it give solar panels more power to put a 1-way mirror facing down on top of a solar pannel. Would the light stay trapped longer and give the solar pannel more energy?
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There's no such thing as a one way mirror. They're equally reflective and transparent in each direction, and just rely on the room on one side being darker than the other. So no, it would just reduce the amount of light the panel received. Edit: Also, "Would the light stay trapped longer" is incorrect. Once a photon hits the solar panel, it's gone, absorbed and converted into electrical energy. It can't bounce off then hit the panel again. The only possible effect would be to reflect light that bounced off the panel instead of being absorbed back down to it, but as I said, not doable.
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I think you are confusing [solar panels](_URL_2_) with [solar furnaces](_URL_0_). A solar furnace typically *does* have parabolic mirrors like you described which reflect sunlight to some concentrated point with the hopes of using the heat energy (by say, boiling water) to generate energy. Solar panels are much different - they contain [photovoltaic cells](_URL_1_) which *absorb* the sunlight and convert it directly to electricity by the photovoltaic effect.
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Are there any American banks which keep 100% of deposited money without investing it (maybe charging a fee for storing money). Would such a bank not need fdic and be secure in any financial market?
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> Are there any American banks which keep 100% of deposited money without investing it No, as stated previously this would be a bad business model. > Would such a bank not need fdic A bank probably wouldn't need FDIC because it wouldn't really be a bank, more like a safety deposit box. It would still need some sort of insurance because the money could be stolen, the building could burn down, etc. > and be secure in any financial market? Quite the opposite, the money would be insecure in almost all financial markets. Inflation means that that every year money is worth less and less. By holding on to cash, the value of your money is being slowly lost. If you are charged a fee for storage, you are losing money at an ever greater rate. This method of money storage guarantees a 100% loss in value over a long enough period of time.
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The FDIC. If your attempts at investment go sour, you would lose all of your money. If a bank messes up, your money is insured by the Federal Government up to $250,000, so you lose nothing. There is zero risk with putting your money in a bank, but investing is always risky.
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Why doesn't reddit have its own image sharing option? Why are most images posted from _URL_0_?
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technicaly it does, imgur was created by a redditor for easy sharing on reddit.
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Imgur is designed specifically for large scale image hosting. That's its whole purpose, to not go down when millions of people access images.
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Could electrons or quarks be made of more fundamental sub-sub particles?
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It is possible, but there's no theoretical reason or experimental indications to suggest that. You can look for experimental evidence of quark compositeness in LHC data, [like here](_URL_0_). There was something called the preon model that had particles making up quarks and electrons, but I think it's mostly been ruled out by the LHC and has fallen into disinterest.
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[The standard model of particles knows 17 fundamental particles.](_URL_0_) Those particles are considered to be point like particles and not made up of anything smaller. As you can see, electrons are fundamental particles. Thus, to the best of our knowledge, they are not made up of anything. Protons and neutrons, on the other hand, are not fundamental. They are made up of quarks.
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Did the potato mutate into the sweet potato or the sweet potato mutated into the potato? Or do they come from different spices?
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Potatoes (*Solanum* tuberosum) and sweet potatoes (*Ipomoea* batatas) are completely different species. They are both members of the order Solanales. However, sweet potatoes are in the Convolvulaceae family, and are most closely related to morning glory flowers. Potatoes are in the Solanaceae family, a large family with members like tomatoes, eggplant, tobacco, and nightshade. You can't really say that one mutated into the other, but they do share a common ancestor that likely had common features of both these families
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Those things coming out are the sprouting roots and stem. So yes, that is how potatoes grow.
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Train Simulator 2014 and similar games, why do people play these?
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I've enjoyed playing a truck simulator, especially with an Oculus. It's not fun if it's your job, but it's fun to just do things you normally wouldn't do in a relatively realistic manner. Flight simulators especially so.
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Because psychologically, people like earning rewards. It makes us feel good to get experience points, advance in levels, unlock achievements, and generally have fun. Video games provide this to us quite easily because they communicate advancement with direct, perceivable results; it's way easier to see Pikachu gained a level and learned Thunderbolt than it is for me to go to the gym and bust my ass for an hour and be sore and not see any positive visible effects. Also, time you enjoy wasting is never time wasted.
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Is there any Scientific Validity to Salt Lamps releasing negative Ions into the air around them?
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Any time you hear "negative ion" as some sort of health benefit (or any benefit), think "utter garbage." Get a refund if you can and try to educate your mother. The only context that phrase should be used should be in some sort of chemistry or biochemistry. There is nothing specific about all "negative ions" that are good for you. It's an umbrella term for ions that have a negative charge.
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They’re basically just different types of salts that more or less act like charges in a battery. Only instead of a small metal tube, they go into your body.
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Explain how people who have solar cells or wind farms can "put back" energy into the power grid, LI5.
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There is a device called an inverter that converts the energy produced by the generator or solar cells to the same voltage and frequency as the power grid. This device is designed to synchronize the frequency with the grid. Once synchronized the power can safely be fed back through the meter to the grid, in effect, running the meter backwards in the process. Remember that the power in the "grid" doesn't come from a single generating point. That's why it's called a grid. When you use a synchronizing inverter, you simply become another generating station attached to the grid.
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Cost. Solar panels are still more expensive to make and install vs. tapping into existing infrastructure. Also, anywhere without good sun exposure will get crappy use from solar panels. The need for a second, backup source of power for extended periods of time would, effectively, make it cost more to do solar than to just tap into the grid in the first place.
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(from xkcd WhatIf) What is the derivative of ln(x)^e dx ?
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It's e\*ln(x)^(e)/(x\*ln(x)), or alternatively e\*ln(x)^(e-1)/x. It's funny because ln(x) is the inverse of e^(x), so ln(e^(x)) = e^ln(x) = x, which would have a derivative of 1. If you don't look carefully it might look the same, but it isn't. Edit: Battling Markdown.
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The log(x) operator is usually expressed as base 10, or essentially the opposite function to 10^x. Ln is short for natural log, or log base 'e' (approx 2.71828) or the opposite of e^x.
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In the middle ages how did they picture what was ancient Rome
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Hi. While questions are always welcome, I think you should see one of our older threads: * [How were Roman ruins perceived in the medieval period, if at all?](_URL_0_)
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I answered this question for Classical Greece a while ago [here](_URL_0_). I hope someone else will be able to write on Rome. Meanwhile, feel free to answer follow-up questions in this thread :)
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Certain whiskies go from clear to clouded and/or start exhibiting Rayleigh scattering after I add water. Why?
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A picture could probably tell more, but from the description I think you might be seeing the [ouzo effect](_URL_0_). This effect would make the whisky very cloudy though, and would require that there was a significant amount of oils left over from the fermentation. In essence you are making a microemulsion out of the oils that were dissolved in the higher % ethanol whisky (hence, clear solution) that are now forming a different phase when you dilute the ethanol with water. The microemulsion caused by this effect usually makes droplets that are too big to scatter visible light though, so it is also possible that you are just crashing out very small particles that were not filtered. In this case, the water again dilutes the alcohol which can cause lower solubility of particles left over from the fermentation/distillation.
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When light passes from one medium to another where the two mediums have different speeds of light, some of the light will be reflected. Water with no bubbles has a uniform speed of light through it, so once light is in the water, it doesn't need to cross boundaries between light and air any more, so there are no reflections coming from within the water. When there are bubbles, there are lots of places where light has to cross water/air boundaries, and each time, a bit of light is reflected. If there are enough fine bubbles, the whole thing will look white.
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how pedometers or activity monitors like Fitbits work?
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They don't... they're about as accurate as your cellphone pedometer. But to answer your question, there's a sensor that detects motion - those are your steps! Sometimes you can calibrate the sensor to be more accurate but it's still usually incorrect. The sensor itself is either electric or mechanical and measures motion between strides. These days they are the same kind of sensor that turns your cell phone screen on when you move your phone away from your ear during a call.
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it tracks your movement while you sleep. If the wearable has a heart rate monitor, it uses that as well to further it's accuracy. Generally speaking, the more you move in your sleep, the less accurate the readings will be. But overall, some studies were conducted on sleep trackers, like the Jawbone and others, and it was concluded that they're pretty accurate with sleep tracking. & #x200B; Also, to this point, no matter what your sleep tracker says, it cannot accurately tell you about your REM, or deep sleep, stages. For this, it needs more sophisticated equipment like eye tracker, brain waves, etc...They try to do as accurate a job as they can with movement and heart rate to measure REM sleep but it's not really that accurate.
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Why is the legal limit 0.08?
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The original limit was 0.15, and this was set based on a study done by the American Medical Association in 1938. The group MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) came along and lobbied hard to lower limits, first to 0.10 and then to 0.08. *This is not based on any science.* They'd really like to have prohibition back, and they are just working the limit down little by little. In 2010, 70% of drivers involved in a drunk driving fatality had a BAC of 0.15 or higher.
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It's a limit which Congress can vote to raise. By only raising it a bit at a time, they effectively get to hold the country hostage every time the limit needs to be raised, saying they'll only raise the limit if they get other things they want.
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How do Chinese authors create fictional words?
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I guess you're referring to the logographic writing system used in China? It's not purely logographic. This isn't a new problem, there are new things and people have names and new words always happening, so if there is not a decided symbol for something, you break the word down into syllables or sounds for which there are characters, and you just ignore the actual meaning of the characters. It's not a problem for Chinese speakers, because it's typically obvious in context when 但二日似 "dan-er-ri-si" is referring to a name rather than "however two sun seem". (that's probably not how that name is actually written in Chinese)
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Most physical Chinese keyboards look identical to the one you're using to write in English. Basically, they're using the Chinese phonetic alphabet, which was developed in the '50s. Usually, it's used with only those characters available on the English keyboard when typing, so no umlauts (ü), no diacritic markings to indicate tone, etc. Otherwise, it works just like swiftkey or autocorrect. So, you start typing, let's say "ni hao," (hello in chinese) and by the time you finish typing "ni," a whole list of words that start with "ni" phonetically pops up, listed in order of usage and such. You choose from this list by hitting a number key, or you can move further down the list by hitting a different key.
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How iron mining differed from bog iron harvesting?
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There were bloomeries in Delaware that smelted bog iron in the early 19th century. And there’s a document saying 6 men dug out 574 tons of ore in 5 months, that is about **750 kg of bog ore in a day per worker**. > An estimate of Collins' operations may be gained from the field account of ore raised at Smith's beds between May and September, 1821. This tally booklet, now in the Collins Papers at the Delaware Hall of Records, states that six different men hauled away 574 tons, 11 hundredweight of ore from these beds, which apparently lay near Milton. source:“The Delmarva Bog Iron Industry” by Edward F. HeiteNortheast Historical Archaeology vol. 3: Early American Iron Making1974
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In early times, a lot of iron ore resources came from swamps [bog iron](_URL_1_). For example the Vikings and the Russians this was a major source of iron. The time period you're describing is medieval times, by then a lot of rich iron ore resources would be discovered already and much trade was present in Europe, therefore distributing iron ore (raw steel ready for further tooling) would be possible.
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Why does microwaving food (example: frozen curry) taste different from putting it in the oven?
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Microwaves work by heating up the water in foods, not actually the foods themselves. Heat is transferred from the water to the rest of the food. This also tends to make the water expand into steam, so it gets everywhere, making everything wet. This interferes with the [Maillard reaction](_URL_0_) which is what makes roasted foods so delicious. That's why oven make things crispy browned delicious on the outside, tender on the inside (because the water turns to steam on the inside after the outside has cooked) while microwaves just leave a soggy mess.
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Yes, microwave ovens distort chemical structures in foods. The heat from the microwave energy causes proteins to uncoil and change their shape, causing their texture and flavor to change. This phenomenon is known as "cooking", and is the same whether you microwave, boil, bake, or fry food.
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What exactly is KeystoneXL Pipeline and why are parties so split on it?
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It's an expansion to an existing pipeline that would make it easier to ship oil from Canada and North/South Dakota down to Louisiana, where there are a lot of oil refineries are. If you think that oil money is good money, that it's a resource that we should utilize while there's demand for it, and it can only help to produce more jobs and improve our economy, you're going to be for the pipeline. If you think that we're already far too dependent on oil so making more sources of it available is like feeding our addiction, that we're already too unconcerned with the socialized costs of fossil fuels while the privatized profits get shunted to a few people with the right connections, and that this pipeline has extraordinary environmental implications (especially if things go wrong), then you're against the pipeline.
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An oil pipeline so long will have a very high risk of spills. It will also increase usage of petroleum when we should be investing in cleaner, more sustainable energy sources instead.
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How do long-acting time release medications work? How are they formulated and how do we process them differently?
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some medications need to be altered by your body via enzymes before they can make the desired affect on the body. one example of this is lisdexamphetamine, its an amphetamine molecule which does the work on the body, however, it is bonded to lysine, which is an amino acid and dextrose which is a sugar. the enzyme activity takes time to cleave the two groups from the amphetamine and it the rate depends on the limited availability of the enzyme.
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I am not an expert, and a quick Google search doesn't turn up much about polistirex, but I see that it's a sulfonated styrene-divinylbenzene copolymer, which is primarily used as a ion-exchange resin. It probably doesn't "break down" in the body, but rather, passes through the system relatively undigested while releasing the medication it's packed with. I imagine that it works by sticking ionized drug molecules onto the polistirex carrier molecule (by interacting with the negatively charged sulfonic group). In the presence of another positively charged ion (a counterion, so to speak), of which gastric acid in the stomach and intestinal environment is full of (for instance, potassium chloride or the hydrogen in hydrogen chloride), the ions are exchanged and the drug is released. Again, this is just my hypothesis, but hope it helps!
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How can scientists accurately predict things that will happen in space years away, yet not accurately predict the weather for the week?
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The atmosphere is a far more complicated system than space. In space, you have one major force acting on everything -- gravity. Any given object of any size to be of interest to us is affected by gravity in completely predictable ways. The atmosphere is a far more complex system, one that we are still learning about. Although we do have very accurate weather predictions, though the further out in time you get the less accurate the predictions are.
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We can predict it using simple orbital mechanics. It can be very accurate. Knowing our distance from the sun, velocity, location of the moon, it's velocity relative to us as well as a few other factors, you can just plug it into an equation for when the sun and moon are in alignment with the earth and then just solve for the amount of time and translate that into days.
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I've often heard it said that the ancient Romans were so culturally and ethnically non-homogenous that "racism" as we now understand it did not exist for them. Is this really true?
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I think this is a simplification. Racism as we know it today did not exist in Rome, or at least it did not have the same basis (nor was it as deeply embedded). But cultural stereotyping and what we might call bigotry certainly did exist--Juvenal, for example, rants at great length about how Greeks are effeminate, decadent flatterers and corrupters of Roman character. But he also acknowledged what he considered the antique Hellenic virtue, embodied by such men as Pericles and Leonidas. That is one essential difference: it was culturally, rather than biologically based. It is also worth noting that, to my immediate recall, the Roman artistic depictions are Africans are realistic and not stereotyped.
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Hi, not to discourage further answers, but there's [a section in our Frequently Asked Questions page](_URL_0_) which deal with the way that black people were treated in Rome and the differences between the current concepts of racism and ancient forms of xenophobia.
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How do people figure out molecular structures?
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There are dozens of ways you can determine a molecule's structure, as this is one of the main goals of analytic chemistry. A common way for crystals is crystallography. By using the diffraction patterns produced by hitting the sample with x-rays, neutrons, etc., it's possible to work backwards to find the structure. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) is another common method, which uses the intrinsic *spin* of the nucleus of the atoms inside the molecules for identification. This can give detailed structural information just by looking at tiny differences in the local magnetic field. There are many others that are used together in order to help figure out, then verify structure, including mass spectroscopy and many other forms of spectroscopy. [Here is a relatively full list.](_URL_2_)
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There are a phew different methods to find about the molecular structure of proteins (for example receptors). Like you mentioned there’s NMR, but the main method is protein crystallisation followed X-ray diffraction. So „protein crystallography“ is the word you might want to google. It’s quite complex but in short: you purify your protein of interest from the cell, then you make perfect crystals and than you let X-Rays be diffracted by it. What you then get is a lot of dots which correspond to the atom distances of your molecule (in this case your molecule is quite big as it is a protein). An then a very complicated data evaluation begins and in the end you get a 3D structure of your protein. Having that you can check which ligands would fit into a certain binding pocket. For example the charge of the amino acids there could determine the binding affinity. And then there is also cryo electron microscopy. Do you remember the Nobel prize for chemistry last year?
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Why, when opening one door in a house, does another door often open a little as well?
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Its caused by the change in air pressure that results from opening the first door. I think.
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Air pressure. Closing the door pushes air into your room. If the windows are shut, the air pressure increases, which resists the door's movement. While the slight change in pressure might not seem immediately noticeable, the door has a big surface, which really amplifies it. When the windows are open, that extra air can escape, so the door moves more easily.
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What is going on inside my body biologically that causes Nausea?
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Nausea and vomiting is complicated process that can be caused by many things. At a basic level there are two important areas in the brain that are involved; in the brainstem there is the appropriately named "vomiting centre" which seems to be responsible for co ordinating the whole vomiting reflex - stimulating it will make you feel nauseous and throw up. The other area is higher up in the brain, and is called the area postrema, or the chemoreceptor trigger zone, and seems to be stimulated by chemicals in the blood. It can trigger the vomiting centre. Lots of stimuli can trigger the area postrema, or the vomiting centre directly. Direct inputs from higher centres in the brain can do so, which is why certain sights or smells can make you physically sick. In terms of your question of a decrease in blood flow to the brain, the answer is yes - a low blood pressure will very commonly make people feel nauseous.
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In this context you are talking about being 'nauseated'. To be nauseas is to cause nausea or to be sickening. This is a very common misconception that even doctors get wrong.
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How come Americans call the front of your hair "bangs" but Brits call it a "fringe"?
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Same reason the front of a car is a "hood" in America but a "bonnet" in the UK: just a minor difference in language.
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I'm guessing it has something to do with the history of war. Hair can become a liability in hand-to-hand combat.
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What actually came of women having to register for the draft in the United States?
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The US Senate *did* have language in a bill that said they would have to enroll in the Selective Service starting January 1st, 2018. But that condition was taken out in the final version of the bill. So as of right now, it's something that is still "being explored" but there has been no final decision on whether or not women who turn 18 will have to register for it. The old system, where only men are required to register, is still in place.
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There are some basic problems with this question. First, women didn't have the right to vote at the time. Prohibition was ratified by the final necessary state January 16, 1919. The final state to ratify the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote, did so on May 21, 1919. Only 15 states had given women the right to vote before this. Also, "most of the men" were not overseas fighting in WW1 at the time. US forces numbered around 2 million. At the same time the population of the US was around 100 million.
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Why do planets and celestial bodies rotate?
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ELI5: Imagine a lot of children running around in a park with their arms held out. When two children run past each other close enough to touch, they catch each other by the hand and keep running. As they pull on each other, they start to rotate around each other. Eventually, all the children catch hold of one another, and you end up with a line of children all spinning around the middle of the line. Planets were formed from big clouds of dust and gas pulled together by gravity. The dust and gas particles were all moving in different directions, and when two particles got close enough together, they started spinning around each other. Eventually, all the dust and gas formed a single rotating mass, like a three-dimensional version of the line of children.
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I am not sure what "spatial" means in this context but, I'll answer why the planets in our solar system are in a plane. The sun and all the planets were formed from a big ball of gas (the proto-solar nebula), that slowly collapsed in on itself due to its own gravity. At some point, the fact that the gas was slowly spinning generated a force that was comparable to the gravitational collapse, and the system formed more into a plate-like shape. Most of the gas stilled flowed toward toward the center, and formed the early sun. Some of the rest of it, especially the sooty particles we call astrophysical dust, agglomerated into the planets. The planets retained the motion of the gas and dust they were born from, and thus all orbit in the same plane, which has the same sense of rotation as the sun itself. I am not up on all the recent results from Kepler and other planet finding missions, but I do believe that not all systems have all the planets in a relatively flat plane, though most do.
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Why a candle wick doesn't burn right to the bottom of the candle
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It is not the wick or even the wax that is burning. It is the vapor of the melted wax in the wick. The part of the wick that actually burns no longer has wax in it.
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The smoke is unburned or partially burned fuel. When burning the candle more competently consumes the fuel, but when it is blown out it does not.
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How do they make bamboo, which is circular, into flat flooring which looks like one piece?
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It's large bamboo, cut into strips, planed or steamed into rectangles, then edge-glued into sheets. If you look you can see the dark patches which are the nodes in the original bamboo - think of the "knuckles" in a piece of grass, which is essentially all bamboo is. Those dark patches stretch across just one strip of the original material, so you can measure how wide each strip is - about 10-15mm usually.
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They are grown in a commercial greenhouse. These are usually big operations and they are experienced at growing things like house plants efficiently. Many use a mix of human labor and specialized machines for some automation depending on the plant. Mostly just people though. For those twisted and braided lucky bamboo they grow the plant, braiding it as it grows (it grows pretty fast) then cut it into sections to sell as individual plants. Also those lucky bamboo are not actually bamboo. They are Dracaena, a common houseplant species native to Africa. Completely unrelated to bamboo. You can buy the full size plant at any home store in the US and many other countries.
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How are the coloured wristbands being controlled at the Coldplay performance at Glastonbury tonight?
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Those are called "xylobands", they have LEDs and radio frequency receivers, by sending radio waves, you can control the software inside the band, which gives a command to the LEDs, making them shine in a certain pattern and a certain colour. The Mylo Xyloto 2012 tour was the first instance were the wristbands were used massively. [This is what is looks like](_URL_0_). Imagine the wristbands and the radio-signaller to be equivalent to a remote control and a tv. You send a signal, the wrist band receives it and it acts accordingly.
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They use photoplethysmography, which measures differences in light absorption. The bottom of those watches have green LEDs and light-sensitive diodes that pulse back and forth and measure how much green light is absorbed or reflected. When blood is in your wrist after a heart beat, it absorbs more green light because blood is red. In between beats, there is less green light absorbed due to the absence of blood. That's why these devices have to be really close to your skin on your wrist. How accurate are they? A study in 2017 showed that the displayed result was within 5 BPM of an ECG reading 95% of the time.
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Millenium Development Goals
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The Millennium Development Goals were a set a goals that the UN set in 2000 to try to improve the position of the worst-off people in the world. Each goal had specific, measurable targets associated with it so that they could evaluate whether or not they were making progress on the goals. For example, goal 5 was "Improve Maternal Health". The specific targets were "Reduce by three quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio" and "Achieve, by 2015, universal access to reproductive health". All of them were aimed at or before 2015. Some of them were met (for example, "Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day") and some weren't (for example, "By 2015, all children can complete a full course of primary schooling, girls and boys").
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If may ask for a bit of clarification, what do you mean by “develop”?
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Why does my cat randomly turn vicious, even while purring?
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Cats can be overstimulated by petting. Some cats are more sensitive to this than others. _URL_0_
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When they scratch and nibble on it it releases a chemical known as nepetalactone. If they inhale it, it's a simulator but if they eat it it's a sedative. Just like people and drugs/alcohol, different cats have different reactions.
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What is that new electronics smell?
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It is the chemicals that were imbedded into the plastic when it was processed either to improve the properties or longevity. When first used, some chemicals may come out until you can no longer smell it. Older plastics will probably have released some of these chemicals and thus will not smell, though there is some left. An example of this would be the new car smell. _URL_0_
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You're smelling ozone. In the presence of an electrical discharge (more noticeable after a lightning strike) O-3 forms, which is what you're smelling.
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What is a Special Prosecutor?
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As it's commonly used when referring to the federal government, it is an attorney who is not normally employed by the federal government who is appointed to investigate allegations of a crime committed by a (usually high-ranking) government official. The idea is they are free from any influence from the official, so the results of their investigation will not be "tainted."
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In many states, a grand jury has considerable powers. They aren't just a tool for the prosecutor to get an indictment, they are tools of the state for the purposes of justice. Sometimes, justice means indicting someone other than who the prosecutor wants you to indict.
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How many people did Francois Duvalier recruit to participate in his secret police, the Tonton Macoutes?
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Several historians estimate that when Duvalier created them in 1959, the _tontons macoutes_ numbered around 25,000. To put this in perspective, the population of Haiti around this time was about [three and a half million](_URL_1_). Butch Ashton, a former Marine who had served in Haiti and helped train the men who would be recruited to become _macoutes_ (the called "Volunteers for National Security") recalled that many of them were ex-military personnel whom Duvalier had disbanded after a failed coup the previous year (see Jeb Sprague, _Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti_, p. 30). The best sources on this that I've found are David Nicholls' [_From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race Colour, and National Independence in Haiti_](_URL_2_); and a federal country study by Richard Haggerty entitled [_Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies_](_URL_0_).
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There's a [former police office](_URL_0_) doing an AMA right now.
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What's stopping us from fully curing Anxiety disorders?
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We don't fully understand the mechanisms that cause anxiety and depression, and we don't fully understand how certain drugs (anti-depressants mostly) work to counter the effects. It really is a case of observing symptoms, applying something, and hoping it works. Then there are individual reactions to different medicines, which mean that you can't just develop one cure and have it work for everyone.
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Some of us are, this is a very real & common problem. It keeps the anti-anxiety med makers & the shrinks in business.
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Why do some people perform better when under pressure or angry, and others perform worse?
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It's called the [Yerks-Dodson Law](_URL_0_) As arousal (stress) increases, performance increases...up to a point. Like any Gaussian distribution, some people will perform better and some will perform worse in certain situations.
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When you are angry your muscles tense, blood vessels constrict, blood pressure rises, and heart rate increases. This combination results in an increased body temperature because your body is producing extra energy from multiple avenues.
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how can a computer show a video or picture in 4k but cant recreate it in a game
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You are correct. You are just watching playback and not doing the heavy graphic intensive processing. But chances are, your laptop doesn't have a 4k screen. So the video also wasn't really playing in 4k for you.
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Because video games are rendered by your dinky little computer. And before you talk about how powerful your $4K video card is, take a look at one of the Transformers from the Michael Bay movie. [See the Driller](_URL_0_)? A **single frame** of motion for the Driller took 288 hours to render, on the *entire render farm* (dozens or hundreds of computers) at ILM, one of the biggest CGI firms in the world. Now, that's a very complicated moving character, but still. Your computer, by comparison, has to render 30-60 frames every second. To do that, it has to cut a lot of the tech used to make stuff like Driller or the building he blasts through look photorealistic.
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What would happen to an eye completely bereft of any light from birth?
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In case anyone is curious, I eventually found mention of a Nobel prize winner who studied essentially this, and was able to then find this paper. _URL_0_ Looks like the answer is that although the eye itself will remain undamaged, some connections in the brain will not form properly and the eye will be blind.
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For a healthy adult, no. Your eyes would need some time to adjust, but there won't be permanent damage. Your eyes could however potentially be damaged by too much bright light when they are not used to it anymore. Small children, whose eyes are still developping however, can develop serious amblyopia (lazy eye). They would also not be completely blind (maybe legally blind) but have very poor vision because their eyes lost a critical training phase.
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why are people upset over red starbucks cup?
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It's part of a larger "War on Christmas" argument that get's brought up every year. Over the last several years, companies have done different things to make the holiday season more inclusive for everyone. The big one was getting workers to say "Happy Holidays" to customers instead of "Merry Christmas" since not everyone celebrates Christmas. This pissed a lot of people off who viewed this change as trying to get rid of Christmas. The red Starbucks cup is seen as another example of that. Usually, Starbucks changes their white cups to red around this time of year and it usually has some sort of wintery or Christmasy design on it. This year, it's just solid red and Starbucks has been accused of taking Christmas off of their cups.
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It's not really a controversy. It's just some guy who wants to make people mad. Starbucks standard cup doesn't mention Christmas. That's it, that's the whole controversy.
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Physics. What are other dimensions like?
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If you were two dimensional, how would I explain the third dimension to you?
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There is no evidence for extra dimensions, but there are some problems in physics that can be solved by positing that extra dimensions exist, and some people are looking for evidence of them to try to verify, constrain, or refute those models. [See here](_URL_0_) for a more detailed discussion.
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Can animals have OCD and other stuff of that kind?
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Animals can suffer from mental disorders, but because animals' brains are very, very different from Humans, these will manifest in *completely* different ways. To the point where naming them the same would be very misleading. It's worth noting that the vast majority of people don't know what OCD actually is. Hollywood's presentation of mental disorders is *very* distorted, and OCD is one of the biggest ones they get wrong. Animals like dogs and cats do not have the mental capacity to have OCD.
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Yes, and some of these can be used as animal models to study human psychiatric illnesses--but these animal illnesses are a little bit different. Take OCD, for example--in humans, that disease presents as a cluster of symptoms. We have animal models of many of each of these symptoms (compulsivity, or overgrooming/skin picking, or stereotyped behavior), but not necessarily of a mouse "with OCD". [See](_URL_1_). Other behaviors/pathologies, like [violence and aggression](_URL_0_) are harder to pin down in animals. On a more qualitative note, I think that part of the reason is because we as humans kind of define abnormal violence as something that cannot be explained by certain fundamental drives ("killing sprees for no reason"). An animal killing another animal over mates, territory, access to resources, etc. thus doesn't seem like "violence" to us, although a human killing another human over the same things may or may not, depending on the exact circumstance.
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Why does letting your phone die permanently affect the life of the battery?
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Just to make a clarification, the act of letting your phone die in itself does not affect the battery. If the device's battery management hardware is engineered properly, which most are, you can use your phone until it dies without worry. The problem arises when you let it die, and then never charge it for an extended period of time (months, not days). Basically the internal resistance of the battery cells increases drastically and the battery is therefore less capable of receiving a charge. If you find an old device that hasn't been used in a long while, take caution if attempting to charge it. The battery can overheat and explode!
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Complex math. Basically though when a battery supplies a current the voltage is not completely constant. If you measure a fresh battery and one that's almost out of juice you will see the dead one is putting out slightly lower voltage. Also, your phone's OS keeps track of these readings through several charges so it can calculate remaining battery life more accurately.
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Is there a real way to find out if a number is prime without doing trial and error?
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Yes. This is a large topic so I'll just give some pointers on where to find more information. There are two kinds of primality tests: deterministic and non-deterministic. Deterministic tests can determine for sure whether or not a number is prime (trial division by all primes less than sqrt(N) is an example of a deterministic primality test). Non-deterministic tests will be able to determine that N is prime with a probability of something like 10^-k, where k can usually be made as large as you like by repeating the test with different conditions. A good example of a deterministic test is the [AKS Primality Test](_URL_0_). This is also a very efficient test. A good example of a non-deterministic test is the [Miller-Rabin Primality Test](_URL_2_). There are a lot more on [Wikipedia (primality tests)](_URL_1_). [Here is a short review](_URL_3_) which covers a few other methods.
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The largest prime numbers we know are Mersenne primes. These primes can be written in the format M = 2^n - 1, where n is an integer. The current largest known prime number is 2^74207281 - 1. Obviously not all numbers of this format are prime, but having this format narrows our search by giving us lots of candidates. Once we have a candidate, we use an algorithm called the [Lucas-Lehmer primality test](_URL_0_), as it's the most efficient known way of determining if a number is prime.
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Why do different animals have different life spans?
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From an evolutionary standpoint, the most important goal of an organism is the passing on of its genetics to the next generation. This requires lots of energy. Some animals, like flies, expend that energy all at once, releasing as many offspring as possible and then dying. By releasing so many offspring all at once, the are taking a gamble that come of them will survive. Other animals, like elephants, limit energy expenditure at birth by have one offspring at a time and invest addition energy into that one offspring in order to ensure that it reaches sexual maturity. So, differences in life span, at the most basic level, are the result of different strategies utilized by various species to ensure that their genetics are passed on.
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In a simplistic explanation, the Rate of Living Theory suggests that between species larger species live longer because they have lower metabolic rates and thus produce free radicals at a slower rate metabolisms. These free radicals are thought to cause cellular damage which are related to aging. BUT within a species the average metabolic rate is the same, but larger individuals of a species having more cells and more reactions occurring produce more free radicals. This means that within a species the larger individuals have shorter life spans while among species the opposite is true. Source? _URL_0_
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We always see ridiculously over-sized weaponry in videogames, but what was the largest melee weapon to ever be used effectively in combat in real life?
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Although its use is often overstated in historical fiction, and everyone that played Medieval 2 and their brother already knows about it, the [Zweihander](_URL_1_) did see some combat during the late medieval and early renaissance period. These great swords were built up to sizes as large as two meters long, and were mainly manufactured by German, Swiss, and northern Italian smiths. They weren't particularly common, and were mainly used by mercenary units performing the duty of anti-pike infantry, as the swords were supposedly effective at breaking the heads off of polearms. Source: _URL_2_ If we're talking about sheer length, however, the [Macedonian Sarissa pike](_URL_0_) is a strong contender.
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Generally speaking, over-sized weapons have generally tended to be polearms, which makes sense. You take something sharp and you put it on a stick, thus you are able to reach an enemy while he can't reach you. Pikes, halberds, poleaxes and other variants have been in use since ancient times. For a brief period in early modern times (15-17th century) some swords got progressively longer until we got what we now know as a two-handed sword. These swords, called Zweihänders, became the trademark of the Landsknechts, German mercenary companies. I've heard somewhere that their swords were used to cut the heads off of polearms (since Swiss pike formations were big at the time) but I can't verify it so maybe someone else can expand on the subject. However, the modern image of a lone wanderer walking around with a gigantic sword on their back is pretty much fictional. Medieval armies, when not using polearms, preferred shorter variants for better maneuverability.
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If a company is hacked and user name and passwords are compromised, why doesn't the company immediately disable all of the accounts and require a new password upon next log on?
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If it is a very serious breach they will require users to get a new password at some point. Most data breaches are not very severe though, as even if you can access password data it is usually hashed and salted and sometimes even encrypted, which means hackers have close to 0% chance to actually find out passwords of users.
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Most likely explanation is that these celebrities simply had their passwords guessed. A surprisingly large number of people use weak passwords and/or the same password for everything.
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How are internet speeds throttled by ISPs?
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Internet traffic comes in packets of data of different sizes. Your ISP have a router that have what is called a leaky token bucket to throttle your data. If no traffic is coming through there is a "bucket" with the value zero. When a packet comes through the length of the packet is added to the bucket and the packet is sent on to you. But the "bucket" is leaking at a rate of 15mbit/s so it will soon be empty again. Unless there is another packet coming though to fill it up some more. When the bucket is full, typically at about 200ms of your data cap, then new packets are just dropped and not delivered to you. It is also possible that they would delay the packet until there is room in the bucket but only up to a certain amount of time, this helps throughput but gives you worse ping times. This means that you can receive some bursts of data at line speeds but on average you can not get more then the speed you pay.
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I can't speak to other countries but here in Australia our internet speed is largely based on how fast our network technician can turn the crank on the internet box. Speed varies generally based on forearm strength of the operator. Sometimes I can load any webpage in under 12 minutes which is why the majority of my salary gets funnelled into paying for this amazing service.
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Why are semis, busses, fire engines and other big trucks powered by diesel but smaller cars mostly run on gas?
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Because you can get a higher torque output, or power output of the engine, using diesel as it burns at a more sustained rate than petrol. You can also get slightly better fuel economy from diesel, so it makes sense to use it in trucks due to the long distances they travel.
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In this country we ship and transport goods. The trucks have to keep rolling to support our infrastructure. The gas companies know this! You should ask why it is more. Diesel is a byproduct of the process of gasoline...
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Why doesn't "forty" have a "u"in it?
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The reason is that "forty" is based on a contraction, a modified, shortened version of "four", in exactly the same way is "fifty" contains a contracted version of "five". Just like "fifty" isn't pronounced so that the first syllable rhymes with "five", so the first syllable of "forty" didn't rhyme with "four" - until a shift in the way English was spoken, which is known as the "horse-hoarse merger". It's only a result of that change that the two words sound so similar. In fact, in some variants of English (Wikipedia suggests Scottish English, Hiberno-English, the Boston accent, Southern American English, African American Vernacular English, most varieties of Caribbean English, and Indian English), the horse-hoarse merger hasn't happened, and so I'd assume that "forty" and "four" sound different in those variants of English. I don't have anyone near me right now who speaks any of those variants, so I can't confirm this. Source: Wikipedia - _URL_0_
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Because eight/eighteen/eighty-eight begin with a vowel-sound, and therefore get an 'an'. While seventeen, ninety-one or five do not and therefore get an 'a'.
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why is pencil writing so much easier to erase than pen ink?
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Pencil writing, usually graphite, is leaving a mark on the top of the paper. It is putting stuff *on* the paper. Pen ink, meanwhile, is staining the paper. It is putting stuff *in* the paper. Paper is made up of small fibers, and ink will bleed into these fibers, effectively being inside of the paper. Take an old fountain pen with a bunch of ink to a piece of paper to see it in action. It is much easier to scrape stuff off of a surface than it is to actually remove it from the fibers of a paper.
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Color pencil pigment is carried by wax, which only smears around when it's written on something and then erased. You're essentially writing with a form of grease that carries a coloring agent, and like rubbing your finger across a greasy frying pan, doesn't remove it that well without some other form of chemical help (which would likely destroy the paper it's written on in the process). Pencil leads are made largely from graphite, a naturally black carbon form that transfers very well to paper in a tacky powder of sorts. Because it doesn't require any sort of glue to stay in place, and because it doesn't need any sort of wax to carry a different pigment (which is composed of different molecules for different colours), you only really need pressed graphite in the lead. Tacky rubber or plastic erasers remove graphite from paper very well because that substance sticks to graphite better than paper does, so it lifts it off and removes it in the little flakes that come away from your eraser as you use it up.
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how Ipods work and play music
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First off, iPods don't produce the songs out of no where and it doesn't 'remember' to play them. You put the songs on there yourself and then later on you tell it which one to play. The main part of an iPod is the hard drive which works just like your computer's does in the sense that you choose what you want to play/open and it will do it. Each individual song that you see inside of iTunes on your computer is it's own unique file located somewhere on your computer and when you sync all of that music to your iPod, it is actually moving each individual file over. Each of these files contains its own 'metadata' so that you can see the name/artist/album on your iPod and recognise and choose the right song to play. I think that should pretty much answer what you asked. If what you really meant was how do hard drives work (as in how do they store so much data on such a small device) then I'll leave that open to someone else!
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Magnets + electricity = movement Magnets + alternating electricity = back and forth movement Headphones have magnets in them. Your ipod sends an electrical signal that looks like tons of little waves, ups and downs, that move the diaphragm (the external part of the speaker or headphone that moves) so that it vibrates at the desired frequency (pitch) with the desired amplitude (volume). This creates sound. Sound is air vibration. Or the rapid changing of air pressure.
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Why did Clement V specifically pick Avignon as the Catholic seat during papal exile in the 14th century?
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Technically, the Avignon popes resided first in Carpentras, northeast of Avignon, which was the capital of the papal territory known as the Comtat Venaissin and had been ever since it was given to the papacy by Philip III in 1274. Avignon proper was independent of the Comtat, but it was owned by the Angevin counts of Provence, who were allies of the pope and welcomed Clement V in 1309 as he sought a haven from the chaos of Rome (the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran had just been destroyed, and tensions were very high), a move which was suggested to him by Philip IV. Avignon was later purchased outright by Clement VI in 1348 from Joanna I of Naples.
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The Papacy actually moved to Avignon, in France in 1309 and stayed there for much of the 14th century. Keep in mind, though, that for much of its history, the Papacy was actually a power unto itself in Italy. It held significant lands in the country and, thanks to its wealth, could hire soldiers to defend itself when the need arose. It was only in relatively modern times that the Vatican was reduced to a small city state.
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Does testosterone cause aggressive behavior, or is it just a myth?
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To some extent, providing evidence for tenable alternative hypotheses is sufficient to challenge a proposed explanation. Not to put words in his mouth, but Sapolsky's point in that book/passage is not that testosterone has no influence on behavior, but that the role of testosterone in determining behavior is frequently overstated. He pokes holes in the notion that "more testosterone means more aggression," and, by extension, that men are observed to be more aggressive because they have more testosterone. Activational effects of hormones tend to be correlational rather than causal, in part because hormones have multiple functions (e.g. development of sex characteristics, metabolism). That is, which testosterone can be associated with aggressive behavior and risk taking, the story isn't so simple that injecting a person with testosterone will result in a more aggressive person without taking into account the role of context and other biological factors.
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There is a link that connects high levels of testosterone with violent behavior. Men with high testosterone are more prone to irrational, violent behavior and that normally ends up in a crime being committed
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How does traction control on a car work?
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You can think of traction control as basically ABS in reverse. When you accelerate, the car senses whether the tires are slipping on the pavement. If they are, it will automatically adjust the throttle to help them keep traction.
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Works differently for different cars but basically it actively applies power to individual wheels depending on what wheels are slipping or losing traction. Thus, "traction control". & #x200B; Some cars are better at it than others, some barely work. Subaru and Audi generally have the most efficient modern versions. Hondas are terrible and I don't think Toyota suvs are very good at it either.
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Can Ammonia be used to substitute chloride ion ligands in aqueous copper(II) chloride in a ligand substitution?
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You have to be careful with ammonia solution as you'll produce insoluble metal hydroxides. With enough ammonia though, the chloride should be substituted. Ammonia is a stronger field ligand (has more pi character), which lowers the energy of the bonding MOs leading to a stronger ligand interaction than Cl^(-). Although, these difference are relatively small and ultimately an equilibrium is established; the extent to which the equilibrium is shifted to ammonia complexation I'm not sure.
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Silver chloride? It's terribly insoluble, white-looking stuff. The good news it dissolves in ammonia.
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When you have liquid in a straw and have your finger on the top, why does the liquid not drain from the straw?
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[There's a pretty good explanation here with ASCII art too](_URL_0_) but the tl;dr version is > When you lift the straw with your finger on it, you prevent air from getting in. > The water will stay there as long as no air can get into the top of the straw, where its weight can push the water back down > Remember that a droplet has surface tension, and attracts the sides of the straw. The only way that air can get into the straw is by BREAKING the droplet's surface tension. If the straw is narrow, air is not strong enough!
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No air can come in to replace it from the top, and the surface of the liquid at the bottom end is too strong to just break. That strength is size-dependent, though; so, with a fat enough straw, the bottom surface can break, letting the liquid spill down and out of the straw along one side while air replaces it along the other side, even while the top remains covered.
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Why were so many PoWs tortured during the Vietnam War compared to other wars?
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From the very beginning of the war, North Vietnam’s stated position was that American prisoners captured in North Vietnam were “war criminals” who had committed crimes against the North Vietnamese people in the course of an illegal war of aggression and that therefore the American prisoners were not entitled to the privileges and rights granted to prisoners of war (POW) under the terms of the Geneva Convention. [Link](_URL_0_)
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As a counter question what was the extent of VC atrocities in Vietnam
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Why do giant monsters always move so slow
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_URL_0_ this pretty much explains it: ' > as a shape grows in size, its volume grows faster than its surface area. When applied to the real world this principle has many implications which are important in fields ranging from mechanical engineering to biomechanics. It helps explain phenomena including why large mammals like elephants have a harder time cooling themselves than small ones like mice, and why building taller and taller skyscrapers is increasingly difficult. Showing large things moving slowly is something they actually get right.
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Have you seen a large tree falling? Or maybe you have seen how Twin Towers crashed. They are moving fast but because the size is huge, it looks slow. It's all relative.
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Jellyfish lack brains. How do they react to stimulus without them?
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You are right in that jellyfish do not have brains. To make up for this loss, jellyfish have a loose network of nerves spread out all over their body instead. This creates a "nerve net" that can detect stimuli like the touch of another organism. Some jellyfish develope special organs that can sense or detect contact or even the level of sunlight so that they know how close they are to the surface.
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They don't have brains, but they still have a nervous system which responds to stimuli. They don't "think" about swimming. Their nervous system just makes the necessary movements to make them swim. Something gets caught in their tentacles, and the response is to pull it up to their mouth. For reproductions, certain conditions cause them to release sperm or eggs into the water. Eggs that become fertilized settle on the bottom and grow into polyps which eventually break free as new jellyfish.
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Why do Scientific Supercomputers need to be so fast?
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It's simple really. Lets say your computer can do 1000 calculations per second (it's a lot more actually, but it's a convenient number) and for a scientific simulation (weather, pollution, protein folding) you would need to do 1000,000,000 calculations to get the data you wanted, your computer would take 1000,000 seconds (more than 11 days) to get that result. So to get more work done in the same amount of time, you need more computing power. Most super computers nowadays are actually just a large number of 'small' computers (not unlike the one you have at home) working in parallel.
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In the old days a super computer was exactly that, a single very expensive machine. However once computers became mainstream it became much cheaper to connect together a lot of commodity hardware and split up the tasks you want to run on it to run across all of the system. So a modern super computer is made up of nodes, each node is not unlike a normal high end server. Any custom hardware that is unlike your average server goes into the technology the nodes used to communicate with one another, the interconnect, not the CPU, Memory or storage. What makes a super computer fast is number of nodes and the code that's designed to run in parallel, not that any one particular node is anything special.
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What is the scientific community's understanding of race, and how do they differentiate races?
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There are distinct physical and, yes, mental differences between people, those differences can be explained (partially) by genetics, and those genetic differences (and the associated characteristics) can be correlated to the region of the world in which you were born or are directly descended from. **However**, race is simply too broad a category to reflect this correctly. For example, a black person in the United States is likely to be considered a West African, and West Africans have distinct differences from Southern Africans, even though both would be considered to be "black." For another example, a Greek man and a Norwegian man would also have very significant genetic differences, even though they are both classified as "white."
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We can't actually know if there are mental differences between races, since studying them is considered racist and un-PC. It's certainly possible though. Aside from not wanting to appear racist by studying it, it's generally assumed that such mental differences wouldn't even really matter since humans have the ability to control their own behavior. If we found out that X race had a brain that encouraged theft, for instance, would that mean we give a free pass to members of that race who commit theft? I doubt it.
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If two of your fingers were cut off, let's say index and middle, and the doctor reattached them, but in reverse, would it feel like you were touching the opposite finger that you were actually touching?
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Assuming the nerves reattached perfectly (not likely), it'd feel about the same. There's a nerve path from the fingertip all the way to the brain, like a wire. Swapping one finger for another doesn't change the fact that the rest of the path still goes to the same spot It's like: If you're wiring your house up, and you swap the bathroom lightswitch with the kitchen lightswitch, going into the kitchen and flipping the switch won't make the light in the bathroom come on. Source: _URL_0_
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That part of your finger isn't used to being touched. When you cut it close, that part of your finger is now feeling things it's not used to.
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How is a 12oz can of coca-cola and a 20oz bottle of coca-cola both one serving size of coke?
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Because most people will drink the entire can or bottle in a single sitting, and not save some of it for later.
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It has to do with the temperature differential. The CO2 cools the water, which in turn cools the mixed drink. If the bottle or can is refrigerated, there will be less foam.
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If all the mass of the universe was distributed evenly, would space still be a vacuum?
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It wouldn't be a perfect vacuum, but it's not to begin with. The average density of the universe is around 10^-27 kg/m^(3). The best we've managed in a laboratory is around 10^-18 kg/m^(3). So it would be about a billionth the density of that.
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Space is not empty (or a true vacuum), yes. But I seem to remember doing some calculations for physics homework years ago where the premise was that there were only about 5 hydrogen molecules in every cubic meter of space. So it's pretty much negligible (assuming that was and still is correct).
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Where do things go/what do they do once they're inside a black hole?
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First they are pulled apart by extreme gravitational forces in a process called _stringification._ (Edit: /u/The_Elicitor is telling me it's "spaghettification" which arguably cooler. Google agrees his terminology is much more correct.) This happens because gravity increases so rapidly, the matter closest to the singularity is torn away from the more distant matter. Stuff is broken down into molecules, then atoms, and finally into subatomic components. (Edit II: I thought maybe these were quarks, but I did not say anything because I thought I might be wrong. /u/allofthe11 tells me it's quarks _and_ gluons, which sounds very sciency and we can all agree is badass.) Ultimately, it goes into the singularity: all the stuff sucked into a black hole is mashed down into a single point. (Edit III: /u/AccordionOfRama says maybe not and we don't know. I say we make a black hole and find out.) Source: know very little but read AskReddit sometimes.
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Matter can be created or destroyed. Its conservation is an approximation that makes chemistry feasible. In nuclear reactions or relativistic collisions, mass is not necessarily conserved. When things go into a black hole, they just go towards the center. We don't really know what it's like inside.
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How do fish and other animals withstand the immense pressure of the ocean deep.
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Imagine getting a balloon and filling it with air, and diving down to the very bottom of a deep swimming pool with it. The air in the balloon will be crushed by the water pressure, causing the balloon to shrink dramatically, right? The balloon can't withstand the pressure. Now imagine diving down to the bottom of the deep pool and pulling out an empty balloon and a small pump, and pumping the balloon full of water. The balloon will just drift around, not being crushed at all. How does it withstand all that pressure! It doesn't. It's just the same pressure inside as it is outside, so it's not going to be crushed. Animals are mostly bags of water, and so they work pretty much the same.
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Deformation from pressure results from pressure gradients across a barrier. In the case of deep sea life there is no gradient, that is, the pressure inside is the same as outside. Therefore there is no deformation. There is some biologic effect from the pressure, as described in this paper [High-pressure adaptation of muscle proteins from deep-sea fishes, Coryphaenoides yaquinae and C. armatus.](_URL_0_)
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How were North Koreans convinced in just five years that the South was their enemy?
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The South was portrayed as merely a continuation of the Japanese regime, run by former collaborators. This was, in many respects, accurate. The USAMGIK and RoK preserved much of the machinery of state from Japanese rule, and kept a lot of the same people on. Kim and his pals in the North had solid reputations as anti-Japanese resistance fighters. The war was started to liberate the south from fascist collaborator and imperialist American rule (you can judge for yourself the accuracy of that description or the sincerity of Northerners' motives). Sources: Cumings, *The Korean War: A History*, and bits and pieces of *Origins*.
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Though this question has been reported, probably because it touches on current events, I'm going to allow it because: * it features a historical component * we have an excellent North Korea expert whose responses are always a joy to read
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I grew up hearing that one should never eat the first snow. Is there any truth to that statement? What's the science behind it?
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There is no scientific difference between the first snow of a season or any subsequent snows. This is purely a myth. It should become clear that the idea of "cleaning your air" is ridiculous just by learning where your snow comes from: The weather that affects you from day-to-day doesn't come from anywhere near you; the air you're breathing today was mostly thousands of miles away last week. The water vapor and dust ([ice nuclei](_URL_2_)) that eventually became the snow that is falling on you did not come from anywhere near you for the most part. [Here's one specific example](_URL_0_) tracking where the air came from that eventually came together in the same place. Air that ended up in the same place started out thousands of miles apart just 48 hours earlier! In addition, most of the dust that can seed snowflakes [is only in the air for about a week](_URL_1_); they probably weren't even in the air *anywhere* during the last snowstorm.
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Through a process called sublimation. This is where substances go from solids to gases without first becoming liquids (so ice goes directly to water vapor). The ambient temperature may be below freezing, but the sun still adds heat to the snow throughout the day. Once enough energy (heat) is introduced to the ice/snow, it sublimates. *Edit: This source even mentions Mt. Everest. Sublimation is easier at higher altitudes, so it happens even more on mountains. _URL_0_
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Why is Bruce Lee so famous in comparison to the thousands of other top martial artists before and after him?
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Uh, well he was not just a martial artist. He was a movie star, which garners a whole lot more fame and fortune than martial arts alone. Besides being a legendary martial artist we was a great actor and a genius of directing and performing action scenes in movies. He partially or fully directed the action scenes of many of the movies he starred in. His movies were also very good and had totally badass fights. They were kind of a sweet spot of kung fu movies that really appealed to American audiences in the 70s. They had a lot of style and created a lot of the tropes we see in martial arts films.
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he was the first actor from the Hong Kong movie scene to break through and gain mainstream appeal in the United States. he was also one of the first actors to popularize martial arts action movies. he made a large cultural impact.
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Why do hackers focus on government institutions and companies? If they're as anarchist as some claim why don't they do a (modern) project mayhem on financial institutions?
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Financial institution have too much to lose to leave their systems insecure. Most 'hackers' are just script kiddies that break into soft targets.
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They certainly can't hack everything. They are a government agency though, so they have tons of resourves, top level mathmaticians and programmers, they also have the ability to get backdoors into programs due to being an official agency. They also have a lot of money so they can have huge supercomputers to crack certain kind of encryptions. Some encryptions are assumed to be secure though(like AES).
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Would it be possible to 3d print a set of fingerprints to "wear" over your own?
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You don't need a 3D printer for that, this has been done with [plaster casts and liquid silicone](_URL_0_). Of course, with a 3D printer you could copy the prints of some unwitting victim by scanning them off a flat surface and making a 3D mold off that.
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"No two fingers are found to have identical prints, and it is an overwhelming mathematical probability that no two ever will be found to match. The ridge patterns are formed in the human fetus before birth and remain the same throughout a person’s life and even after death until they are lost through decomposition." source: [N Kaushal. Fingerprints: Historical Background And Future Trends. The Internet Journal of Forensic Science. 2009 Volume 4 Number 2.](_URL_0_)
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Why does a person's handwriting never change/improve after years and years of writing?
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I can sum that up with the saying "practice doesn't make perfect - practice makes permanent." If you were to actively practice better handwriting, then it would improve, but otherwise you just keep practicing the same crappy handwriting, making it your permanent handwriting style.
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According to [this research](_URL_0_) it's prenatal hormonal influences. Another answer I've found, but there was no source given, was that male brain develops slower than the female brain, and therefore when children learn to write boys' neural connections are less developed, which results in messier handwriting.
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Are there any detrimental effects of braces on your teeth, gums, or general oral health?
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Brush after every meal and snack because there are hundreds of places to get cavities or ruin the enamel when you have braces. Other than that, the only thing you need to worry about is TMJ, basically your jaw gets a bit misaligned, you grind your teeth in your sleep and it gives you headaches and jaw pain, lock jaw, or you can dislocate your jaw. This only happens if you have dramatic changes, like needing head gear.
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Before I had braces, I was informed by both my dentist and orthodontist that my molars had the wear and tear of a fourty year old's (I was 15,) and that if I were to not get braces, the misalignment of my front teeth would cause me to lose my molars between the ages of 25 and 35. Most od the time they are for cosmetic reasons, but some actually require them if they wish to keep their teeth.
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Why dont we build roads out of stone rather than asphalt?
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I think you're underestimating the cost here. Asphalt is a byproduct of oil refining, which means it is dirt cheap, while stone has to be hauled out of the ground and moved. It also has to be the right shape, which you'll have to cut and/or level to get a solid foundation for the road, and there will still be seams between the stones. Over time, the road will sink, which means you'll have to realign the stones, while the asphalt should deform comparatively uniformly until it has to be replaced. So, lots of costs associated with stone. Much higher than you'd predict.
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I don't know where you are and what constitutes 'regular' roads. Asphalt roads vary, essentially the different types have different quantities of stone (cheap) and bitumen (expensive). Types include bitumen macadam, hot rolled asphalt and stone mastic asphalt. These are all considered flexible pavements and the thickness of the layers are often around 2.5x the size of the stone in it to aid compaction. Concrete roads are made of concrete with layers of reinforcing mesh, with joints at certain intervals to allow it to expand and contract which could otherwise cause cracking. Sometimes cuts are made to ensure cracks happen uniformly. Both are generally supported by compacted graded crushed stone.
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What is the minimum area in which rain can occur?
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Your own definition has doomed your question. When you say "I don't mean scattered droplets", well, what exactly are you asking? Technically one drop is the minimum amount of rain that can fall from a single cloud (and yes, this is completely possible). Technically a stream of drops could fall in single file, making the rain shower the width of the drops (but no, this is likely impossible). If you want a more specific answer you need to ask a more specific question.
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I remember an experiment we did a long time ago when I was in high school, and if I remember correctly, rain droplet size has a strong correlation with the altitude of the clouds they come from. IIRC the droplets starting from higher up have a longer time to fall, which increases the chance of random collisions where the droplets effectively stick together, growing in size. This breaks down after the droplets grow to 4-5mm, when they tend to break up again due to sheer forces as they fall. The last link proposes that this breakup process happens much earlier than has long been theorized, supposing the chance for random droplet collisions after condensation to be much lower than traditionally assumed. _URL_1_ _URL_2_ _URL_0_
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What is the purpose of capacitors and resistors in electronics?
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Resistors are used to limit current from a known voltage, since many components can handle a much larger range of voltages than they can currents. A capacitor stores power which can be used for many things from creating timers like in a toaster (if you run a capacitor and a resistor in series then you can actually determine how long it will take for a capacitor to discharge) but it can also be used to smooth the current/voltage like if you rectify AC into DC then you will get a very bumpy output but if you use a capacitor then it will be slightly less so (actually a lot less, it's hard to explain it)
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It's mostly to make sure the capacitors discharge, though it's also partially to make sure all disks and fans are stationary. Capacitors, by the way, are electronic components that store electricity. Think of them like buckets that hold electricity.
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If elements like Radium have very short half lives (3 Days), how do we still have Radium around?
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Basically, other stuff decays into it. > Radium has 25 different known isotopes, four of which are found in nature, with 226Ra being the most common. 223Ra, 224Ra, 226Ra and 228Ra are all generated naturally in the decay of either uranium (U) or thorium (Th). Also, note which isotope is the most common in nature. > the most stable isotope being radium-226, which has a half-life of 1601 years _URL_0_
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An *element* doesn't have a half-life, each individual *isotope* of every element has its own half-life. There are some radionuclides on Earth whose half-lives are much smaller than the age of the Earth, for example carbon-14. It just means that these nuclides are being produced by some processes that happened after the birth of the solar system, and could still be ongoing.
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Why is it so hard to find data dumps on the internet?
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There are many more people reading the news about data dumps than looking at the data themselves, so the search engine prioritizes the news. To find the data, look through a torrent website.
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Because it created about a bazillion horcruxes when it let people download it's (very small) entire databade
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Howcome my car has sensors for everything and anything, including rain, closed doors and seatbelts, but it will only show an oil warning light when it's approaching dangerously low levels instead of "Hey, change your oil somewhere between now and the next 5 months and you'll be fine" ?
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I assume you're referring to the oil pressure warning light, which looks like an oil canister teapot thing. That one in most vehicles is tied to pressure sensors in the car's oil circuit. This warning light is very serious. When the oil pressure light comes on, it means there is an immediate problem with the oil flow and you are at risk of overheating the engine or destroying components that need oil lubrication. The "change oil" light isn't as critical, and in most cars is actually just based on mileage. When you get an oil change, the mechanic resets this counter. Some modern vehicles have more elaborate oil monitoring features where it will tell how close you are from needing a top off in oil.
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If you mean an oil quantity gauge, the oil gets pumped all around the engine, it doesn't just sit in a tank till it's needed like fuel does. This makes it difficult to measure the oil quantity when the engine is running. It is possible to fit oil temperature and pressure gauges to cars, and many enthusiasts do, especially if they intend to race their cars and want advance warning that something might be broken. But for most purposes, the single light on your dashboard that warns of low oil pressure is considered to be sufficient, combined with checking the oil level with the dipstick regularly.
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Can a person have diabetes if they are not overweight?
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It's definitely possible. Most people who develop [Type I diabetes](_URL_0_) are otherwise healthy. Even Type II diabetes isn't universally caused by obesity.
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Well first, not all obese people have underdeveloped legs. If an overweight person is active and heavy, chances are they kick like a horse. Their core might be better developed than you'd think as well, since a lot of abdominal muscles act to keep the torso in line and that becomes more difficult when reacting to shifting weight. I know several people who, due to thyroid problems are quite overweight, but are in much better shape than I am, Second, if an obese person has underdeveloped musculature, it is because they are sedentary. This can be caused by a lot of factors. A lot of people develop joint problems in their knees and ankles when they gain weight that make it difficult or painful to walk. The subset of obese people who are depressed will avoid activity because that's one of the things depression does to a person. Type 2 diabetes can result in bloodflow and nerve problems in the peripheries like hands or feet that make it difficult to move.
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Why does any number to the power of zero equal one(x^0=1)?
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Well, let's think of it this way. If you have n^x / n^y, how can you write that? You can write it n^(x-y) So let's say you have 2/2 = 1. This is the same as 2^1 / 2^1 = 1, since 2^1 = 2 And because we know that n^x / n^y = n^(x-y), then 2^1 / 2^1 = 2^(1-1) which is 2^0 and therefore 2^0 = 1 That holds true for every number.
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Why have a $1 when you can have $10000000000000000000?
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How imgur file names work.
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Think of normal decimal number systems. 0 through 9. When you get more than 9, you just increment to 10 and keep going until you get to 99, then you just add another 1 in front, etc. Imgur and other sites like _URL_0_, instead of limiting themselves to just numbers will include letters. After 9 comes a, b, c, etc. Then after z comes A, B, C, etc. One you hit Z, the next number becomes 10. After 1Z, you go to 20. After ZZ, you go to 100. Etc, etc. This lets them account for really huge numbers of images while still allowing short IDs. In a system like I described, ZZZZ is the equivalent to 916,132,832.
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Think of clicking posts on r/pics. Suddenly, your computer is downloading images from imgur. But really, you're not downloading a picture. You're downloading a string of numbers. And somehow, that string of numbers is turned into a picture by your computer using some mathematical formula or more complicated algorithm. For each image format (gif, bmp, jpg, png, etc.) there's a different equation. This "self-referential" formula is merely one of those equations. You feed the formula a string of numbers, and if you graph it, it produces an image. The image data itself is actually encoded in a constant, here called "k." In this case, the constant "k" contains information to encode the image of the equation itself. But it's not like someone magically stumbled upon this equation by sheer luck. More likely, they created an image file, changed pixels from white to black so they looked like the equation for decoding bitmaps, then encoded it like any other bitmap image into a string of numbers.
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Why did written language first develop in the Near East, and at the time it did?
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China and Mesoamerica also independently developed systems of writing, so the premise of your last question is false.
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You need to distinguish between spoken language and written language. They are, in many ways, separate from one another, and it is very common to have languages that are not commonly "written" or have no written form at all. Russian, before the 9th century, fell into this category. Byzantine missionaries in the 9th century brought a couple of alphabets (Glagolitic and Cyrillic) to eastern Europe as a way to notate Slavic languages, which can't be properly notated in Greek or Latin (Slavic languages have sounds not found in Greek or Latin). In this sense, the missionaries brought "writing" to the Russian language -- but the spoken language itself did not change as a result of this. Over time, Glagolitic fell out of use (except perhaps in some corners of the Orthodox Church) and Cyrillic began to predominate. But again, this change would not have affected spoken language.
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Why does closing your eyes when lying down make you feel like you're resting but lying down with your eyes open you feel no rest? What does closing your eyes trigger in your body?
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When your eyes are open your brain is still processing everything you see for information. Whereas when your eyes are closed you're blocking out that sense from your brain to process. That's why people might go in sensory deprivation tanks at a spa or for therapy. In those tanks, it's completely dark taking away your sense of sight. On top of that you float in the salt water at skin temperature, so that lessens your sense of touch and you're enclosed in a tank with minimal smell. tl;dr: eyes close- > less info processed- > brain rests
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Your eyelids may be closed, but your eyes are still on. You're looking at the back of your eyelids and whatever light that is seeping in. Skin is made up of tiny patterns. Also, when there is a lack of light, our brains try to fill in the gaps. If you've ever tried a psychedelic, closing your eyes will produce the most visuals. Sorry for the shittyELI5.
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