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Why did it take so long to invent the printing press? | Tske into consideration the literacy rate. Most people could not read and had no reason to. Necessity is the mother of invention, that is a true idiom. There wasn't a need for it. As was stated, the Chinese invented movable type a few centuries before Europe. But we did have related items. The Romans had stamps wood bl... |
I've been reading up on nukes. Did the Nevada nuclear tests have nuclear winter? Why or why not? | Nuclear Winter is not a local effect resulting from an atomic blast, but rather a hypothetical effect from lots of nukes going off. The theory is that the nukes would kick a lot of soot and dust up in to the air, blocking out the sun. The blocking out of the sun would result in lower temperatures since the sun can't he... |
Is it ever possible in the future to have matching finger/thumbprints? | The idea that everyone has a unique fingerprint isnt really scientifically proven. There is a real possibility that you and someone else currently living have identical fingerprints. |
How a military can overthrow a government? | The people with the guns stop doing what the president says, and they use their guns to do what they want. That's basically how it goes.Basically they shoot it. All civilian governments have exactly as much power over their military/police forces as those forces choose to allow them, political power grows out of the ba... |
How do we go from binary codes to basic programming languages? | The lowest level instructions in a computer are the instructions of the CPU architecture. This varies between CPUs but there's two main ones currently: x86 used by Intel and AMD processors, and the one used by ARM processors. These instructions usually look something like "MOV 1, 2" which might mean to take the number ... |
why does spicy food stay spicy when it comes out the other end? | Spiciness isn't a flavor, it's a reaction to the chemical capsaicin, which irritates any tissue it contacts, not just your tongue. This is also why the area around your lips gets sore while eating wings.Your digestive system is not %100 efficient. Sometimes raw food makes it all the way though. Spicy is just more notic... |
Why do posts on reddit not start on 0 (what's the purpose of allowing one to vote for oneself)? | To reward you for making a comment even if no one else doesSo you have the satisfaction of having a +1 post and another person has the satisfaction of down voting that satisfaction from you.When your post gets upvoted, its ranking goes up using what's called a [logarithm]. Basically, the more upvotes a post has, the le... |
if you light a lighter in front of a TV, why does the reflection show 4 tiny rainbows around the flame? | This is to do with, not the display itself, but the layers of diffusers that make up the backlight behind the display An LCD TV consists of a backlight and an LCD panel. The backlight's job is to produce an even spread of light across the display. You first have an array of LEDs, but those LEDs are point sources, and y... |
How does copyright work with references? | US copyright has a Fair Use clause, which a minor reference like the ones you are mentioning fall under. You don't need to pay royalties for something like mentioning "I saw something like this on Star Trek once!" or "This is like Episode 79 of the Original Series, Turnabout Intruder! They got bodyswapped!" As to when ... |
Why is the word 'cunt' such a taboo word in the U.S.? | People have made it so. Words can be given such power based on how they're used in the culture. I remember when Austin Powers 2 came out , and that was seen as quite vulgar for British people. In the US, Shagged is a cute word . Just remember that it is how it is taken, not how it is intended. You could be using cunt l... |
why is it so easy for people to start working out regularly but it’s hard to stop eating certain foods or cutting back? | Human being are designed to eat as much food as they possibly can, because in nature food is a whole lot rarer. We crave salt, fat, and sugar. This is a problem today because we have industrial farming and society. When he had to hunt down all out food ourselves it was a lot harder to eat enough to actually.make us fat... |
Why is the USA drinking age set at 21 when in most other respects you're an adult at 18. | In the 60s and 70s, the US had a **lot** of fatalities as a result of teenage drunk driving. Waaay more than any other country did. Really, there were two options available to them: raise the drinking age, or raise the driving age. I think they made the right choice.As someone already said it was because of the drunk d... |
Why do I not smell perfume I've sprayed on me but other people do? | Why don't you see your nose? It's within your vision. Your brain filters out your nose, because it's always there, and likewise, it filters out smells that are "always there". The phenomenon is called [sensory adaptation], this is the brain caring less about constant stimuli. Olfactory neurons also fire less frequently... |
How does a two headed reptile/siamese twins work? How do they move their bodies assuming there are two brains? | Typically each twin controls a different part of the body. Like the twin girls Brittany and Abigail Hensel. They give the appearance of being one body with two heads, though they have two of each organ above the waist. They have two arms, each controlling one. And from the waist down, they have one body, with each cont... |
How do human voices work? What makes our voices seem so unique? | Finally a question that being a voice major has equipped me to answer! : Air passes from your lungs in between your vocal folds . They're quite tiny and produce a tiny sound. Cartilage around them can manipulate/stretch them to make them thinner or thicker . That small bit of sound that they make while vibrating is amp... |
why aren't AK47's an "accurate" rifle | 1. AK-47's distance between the sight and post is very short which makes it so that for longer ranges, it is extremely difficult to line up an accurate shot as you are more likely to be misaligned with your eye to the sights. 2. It uses a relatively low velocity round, meaning it arcs more and spends more time to get t... |
Why can I not remember what happens when I'm drunk? | Memories enter the brain first as short term memory, that is then transformed into a long-term memory. This is evident because the majority of short-term memories that we experience are lost before they ever make it into what we will call "long-term" storage. When alcohol is consumed it affects your ability to take sho... |
Isn't the freshwater we have to work with just going in a cycle? How are we losing fresh water? | When the water ends up in the oceans, it slows down the cycling a lot. Water in aquifers and water on Earth's surface are the cheapest to use. We have been either polluting these or using them too fast for new water to filter in. We have also allowed a lot of water to go to the ocean , rather than slowly go into the aq... |
Why is there such a large Insane Clown Posse (Juggalo) following? | A lot of it is because the group tries to make its fans into a "community" . Like, fans of a band like, say, the Black Keys, are just people who happen to like the Black Keys. But ICP specifically encourages fans, "Hey, dress up like us, be like us, be part of something," and then the fans encourage each other to do it... |
What's the best/safest/quickest way for a relatively skinny but unhealthy guy to get big using weights (w/ or w/o protein powder)? | The gist of it is to lift weights and eat a **lot** of food. A program like Stronglifts is great for beginners. Protein powder isn't magic, it's just a cheap and easy source of protein. Most people find it easier to drink a protein shake than to eat a bunch of steak. It's probably healthier than other sources of protei... |
Why metal at room temperature feels cold while, say, fabric at room temperature doesn't | I believe it has something to do with the rate at which heat from your body is transferred to the material. Your body is hotter than both the fabric and the spoon, which are at the same temperature, but the spoon conducts the heat at a faster rate and so you feel it as being colder. Please correct me if I am wrong or m... |
Why do southern states freak out over a little snow? | There is essentially no infrastructure to deal with snowfall in southern states because it happens so rarely. Roads are not salted or plowed so they are covered in ice, and nobody has snow tires or much experience driving in snow. It is sort of like how everyone up north has trouble with a little heat wave where it get... |
What are those bastardly little tongue sores you get from eating too much salt or sugar, and how do you get rid of them? | The condition is called aphthous stomatitis, or commonly, canker sores. They are NOT inflamed tastebuds. Rather, they are small ulcers that are characteristically painful and confined to the mucosa of the mouth by definition. There is no cure, but many over-the-counter drugs are sold that can mitigate the pain caused b... |
Why are swearing words related to genitals and/or sexuality? | Swear words come from things we consider taboo or distasteful. In English-speaking society, we have a lot of taboos surrounding sex, even in this day and age. We also put a very high level of importance on hygiene, so words relating to waste and where they come from are also taboo. Certain words automatically make your... |
How does a bird know to not sit on its unfertilized eggs? | They don't They will sit on plastic eggs. The hen eventually gives up and deserts the nest and will try again Yeah,the eggs rot if something like a squirrel, or another bird does not eat them before they go bad. _URL_0_ |
Where exactly is a woman's G-spot located, and how do you find it? | Straight in, stick to the top, two o clock until about the second bend in your fingers, if you 've hit your knuckles that's way too far. It all generally feels the same to you but it has sort of an interesting texture. So I know perhaps you 've always been told to do the "Come here" motion but it's actually okay to be ... |
Why do we hear static from radios and TV's when there's nothing being broadcast? Shouldn't we just hear silence? | Because there isn't nothing there. Every spectrum is full of random noise from stars, radioactive decay, all sorts of things like that. It's just terrestrial broadcasts are so much stronger that it overwhelms the random noise. This is why when you start reaching the edge of the coverage area for the station you're list... |
why you can't put metal in the microwave but nothing happens to the metal that it's built from | You can put metal in microwaves, which is a lot come with racks, you just can't put metal with sharp edges/points such as forks and aluminum foil. As for the interior, most microwaves have their interior painted to prevent these issues. |
How do street lights know when cars are there? | There's a couple ways that traffic lights know there are cars there. The first is sensors under the road. They use coils of wire to detect when something magnetic passes overhead. You can actually usually see them if you look at the lanes, there will sometimes be a 4ish by 6ish square that's visible from the surface. O... |
The size of the universe. | There's more than one way to measure cosmological distances. One way is to use what's called the "lookback distance." It's just the distance measured in units of time. If light from an galaxy has been in transit for a billion years, then you can quite accurately say that galaxy is a billion years away. The other way to... |
Why do school hours not match working hours? | That means teachers would go home at 7 or 8pm, school buses would have to contend with commuter traffic, and students would be walking home in the dark most of the time.It's because when the times were setup it was to take into account farm jobs, not the modern 9-5 city jobs. That is also why summer vacation in America... |
How did the Romans express numbers in speech and/or calculation? | This is a really good question, you should probably chuck it over onto /r/AskHistorians, they 'd be more likely to have an actual, factual answer. EDIT: Someone has already asked it over there, the best answer last year came from /u/rosemary85 and goes as follows: > No. The Latin words for numbers are fairly similar to... |
What's the difference between Genetic Drift and Natural Selection? | Both of these concepts deal with traits within a population changing over time. With natural selection, one trait is more advantageous, so organisms with that trait survive and reproduce more effectively, resulting in more organisms with that trait. Genetic drift is when a trait becomes more common within a population ... |
Why do professional athletes have a significantly lower pulse than the average person ? | Because they have increased stroke volume. Their hearts are strengthened so that they are able to move more blood with each pump, so their hearts don't need to pump as many times.You have an empty pool and you need to fill it with water. The bigger the bucket you can carry, the less trips you will need to make to fill ... |
How, with the proliferation of free porn websites like youporn, does any porn production make money? | You like pink crayons a lot. There is this place where you can get free pink crayons, but you have to deal with ads and possibly malware. Also the pink crayons are low quality and the place may not have the specific type or model of pink crayon you are looking for. Now there is this other place where if you pay a bit y... |
How do landlords make money | so essentially making money from letting requires a large amount of time and/or starting capital?', "You're making the assumption that the market price of the house today is the price for which the landlord bought it. As a resident of the UK you're no doubt aware of the fact that in most parts of the country house pric... |
Why do DVDs in widescreen format play with black bars on top and bottom on my widescreen TV | Just because it's "widescreen" doesn't mean that it's the same exact aspect ratio as your TV. A movie with black bars on the top and bottom was filmed in an aspect ration that's even wider than your widescreen TV. Look [here]. Most widescreen TV's are 16:9 , and many movies are filmed in 2.39:1 . Clearly, you cannot sh... |
How do spammers spoof a cell phone number to make scam calls? | When you make an outbound call, the calling system gives the phone system the caller ID information. The reason this can be different from the actual call is for example a business that has both direct lines to each extension and a main line. An employee calling out would show up with the main line as their caller ID s... |
How do we move our body? | Planning and decision making for motor movement happens in the [premotor cortex]. To see where it is, find a spot on the top of your head that's about three inches back from your hairline. This is the section in your brain that makes the decisions about lifting limbs and looking at the ceiling. It takes in information ... |
What is the difference between a CEO and the President of a company? | "President" is a term that is often based on the law of the place where the company is created. For example in the United States, most states require that a corporation have a person with the title President. That title carries with it some legal obligations that tie the individual to the actions of the company. Most j... |
Why does smoking cause some people to lose limbs/develop cancer while there are lifelong smokers who never have these problems? | The short answer is that at the chemical level biology is very complicated. We tend to think of all sickness and injury the same way we think of, say, a bullet wound---a single, distinct harm that directly interferes with how something in the body works in a simple way. But that's not how all harms work. Nicotine and o... |
Why is it, that when I get really tired, everything is so much funnier? | The phenomenon of being more easily amused falls under Emotional Lability which means emotional changeability or instability. You're probably more likely to cry too. In extreme cases, this is a medical condition, see _URL_0_ but in regular life, it's just that the parts of your brain which keep you on an even keel aren... |
Why you need to be grounded to get an electric shock? | Electric currents aren't like Austin from middle school, they don't come out, wander around, bug people, and then go back home. Electricity flows from negatively charged objects, to positively charged objects, until the system is neutral. That's all there is to it. If electricity flows from one location, that means tha... |
How do people get infected with plaque? | Plaque isn't just one bactera it is what is known as a biofilm. Layers and layers of diferent bactera and their extracellular matrixs. Pretty much any bactera can eventually form biofilms. Everyone has bactera on and in their bodies called their natural flora. Your natural flora bactera grow into the plaque on your tee... |
Why is it that a hard drive disc can have a capacity of 5TB+ but DVDs can only have a maximum of 9GB? | In addition to what's already been said about the actual technological differences, one major difference is working conditions. Hard Disks are produced and sealed in clean factories to ensure there is no contamination. They are encased in thick unbend-able metal. From the day you start using it, you can't bend it, get ... |
How much racism/discrimination do Europeans who live in India or Africa face? | Maybe it's not racism or discrimination in the traditional sense, but I've heard anecdotally that whites in Sub-Saharan Africa are more likely to be targeted by robbers because they stand out it's presumed that they have money. |
Why does a company like Boeing need to make a commercial? It's not like anyone watching is going to buy one. | Companies that have to choose between Airbus or Boeing still consist of people , and they can sadly often do so with bias even though they're supposed to run the numbers and make an informed decision.brand recognition. They want you to *value* that your flying on a Boeing airplane, so that name has extra value when the... |
How do American football have bruised lungs without also having broken ribs? Isn't that the point of ribs? | This is actually one of the major issues with American football. The padding protects from the blunt hit and spreads out the impact so you aren't taking a lot of force to a particular place on your body, but your body is still being shoved really hard as a whole. This means the force is spread out and absorbed a bit so... |
What are dentists actually doing when they scrape at your teeth with those metal picks? | I think my dentist was counting money while my hygienist was scraping my teethScraping off the plaque build up. And it is usually the dental hygienist not the actual dentist.Most of the time they're looking at how much plaque is on or around your teeth. In other instances they're determining texture of the top layer of... |
When did we stop having to type in 'www.'? Why did we have to to begin with? | It's because servers where traditionally named according to the services they provide. So a world wide web server had www., a file transfer protocol server had ftp., et caetera. We stopped having to type it because nowadays, the www._URL_0_ and _URL_0_ URLs both refer to the same server . Some sites don't, and so typin... |
How odds work if everything is random? | Odds basically tell you that if the exact same situation were to occur an infinite number of times, what portion of those times would lead to that specific result. e.g. If you have the Ace of Hearts, King of Hearts, Queen of Hearts and Jack of Hearts in your hand and 48 shuffled cards in front of you, there is a 1 in 4... |
how can i press my stomach out? | The mechanism for inhaling is using your diaphragm to basically pull down, creating negative pressure in your lungs. When you inhale deeply to cause your abdomen to protrude, you relax your abdominal muscles and your diaphragm pushes down slightly on your abdominal organs, mostly your intestines, causing your abdomen t... |
What would be the simplest way to "unplug" the internet, causing total shut down by means of disabling hardware? | Like, in your house? Or the whole thing? In your house, just unplug the cable between the router and the modem. The Internet as a whole is so resilient that it would be extraordinarily difficult. Global thermonuclear war might do it. |
The whole Wiki leaks and assange debacle. | Assange made a website that exposed private and sensitive information about important people and events, in particular the government, and they got angry.Well it all started with Wikileaks. Wikileaks is simply a site where classified information is uploaded. Of course, this is not really anything new, News papers have ... |
How my wife and kids would go about inheriting things that are only in my name like bank accounts, house, ect.. | By default, after you die, everything will go to your legal next of kin. That person is defined in this order, and if you don't have a living member of each group, it passes to the next one down: SpouseChildrenParentsSiblings I believe that next comes grandkids, then grandparents, but don't quote me on that. So if you ... |
What is my all carbs/protein diet doing for me? | Weight gain is dependent on calories in and calories burned. It doesn't matter where you're getting those calories from, if you burn them all through activity and lifestyle, then you're not going to put on weight. Olympic Swimmer Michael Phelps ate somewhere around 2000 Calories for breakfast . My only concern about yo... |
What ultimately stops you from jumping higher on a trampoline? | Diminishing returns. The first time you jump on a trampoline, the only real force pushing you upward is coming from your legs. On the next bounce, the trampoline converts a bunch of your downward momentum into upward momentum and helps push you back up into the air. If you push off again with your legs as that's happen... |
What can I do as a single individual to get Gary Johnson in the debates? | You could phone bank, donate to his campaign, that sort of thing. The question you should be asking yourself is why you want Gary Johnson in the debates. His economic policies are frankly terrible. He thinks that socialized medicine is a bad thing, when it's been proven to be the superior system in every measure except... |
(or 18): Indefinite Detention Act | The portion everyone's worried about basically states that if someone is accused or suspected of being a terrorist the US government can detain them indefinitely regardless of whether or not they are an American citizen. This is a big deal because, in addition to reminding everyone of the Red Scare in the 50s, it is a ... |
Why do computer telephone response systems always ask me to type a bunch of info, then transfer me to a human who asks for the exact same info? | I used to work for costumer service and we do this to make it an unpleasant experience for the costumer so that they never call again.It's the same concept as those In-mail rebates that tend to be annoying to complete.That's why I ended up quitting. I didn't like the whole idea of treating the customers bad. |
How bars or clubs charge huge crowds of people randomly ordering drinks. | people either start a tab or they pay up front. it's part of a bartender's job to make sure they get paid for their goods/services. i'm sure some bars and bartenders will allow regulars to get away without paying upfront in certain scenarios, but that really depends on the business and employees. |
What is vanity sizing in clothing? | In fashion, womens' fashions in particular, people want to believe they are thinner than they actually are, and if you get north of a size 6, which is still quit thin, you are often looked down upon for being too fat. Some designers don't even make their clothes in the higher sizes. To make consumers feel better and bu... |
Why group mentality is so powerful | Human nature to belong and conform to social groups, empathy, and natural fear of exclusion. It's kind of instinctual, that's why the weak minded are susceptible to group mentality. Case in point: Reddit. |
Why can't horses get rid of flies on their eyes? | They blink, the fly flies off, goes about two feet, pulls a u-turn and goes back to the eye. They can get rid of them, but they can't keep them away. Really, the ancestor to the domestic horse wouldn't have had this problem because they didn't live in stables. It's the domestic horse's enclosure that attracts the flies... |
What is happening after a workout in our body? | As I understand itIn a workout with decent intensity your body releases testosterone and a pulse of growth hormone. After about an hour this pulse gives way to stress hormones like cortisol. During this time you deplete nutrients from the muscles, stress your bones, and usually slightly damage the muscle fibers. All th... |
What is it like playing intense sport (or exercise) in freezing weather? | Down to -5 no major differences, except you can loose heat rapidly if you stop moving, layering your clothing is important to manage your heat/sweat. -5 to -20 your get an iron taste in your throat/mouth when breathing heavily, otherwise same as above. Below -20 breathing becomes painful, your nose can freeze, your swe... |
what ever happened to Dane Cook? | Credit to /u/noposters for this answer: What people don't realize about Dane Cook is that he was on a mega run before Harmful if Swallowed blew up. Even before his comedy central half hour, he was the highest paid comedian touring colleges at that time . Once his albums blew up, he played MSG, etc. he tried to make the... |
The Hateful Eight in 70mm, is there no way to replicate so every theatre gets that "visual effect"? | Gonna get a little technical: The movie has a digital equivalence of around 8192x2968 . I don't know of any theater that has a projector above 4K, many are even at 2K . So, seeing it in a theater with 4K projection is the next best thing . Movies like Interstellar, The Dark Knight, Star Wars Ep VII , etc. are even bigg... |
How does a watch know when a month has 30 or 31 days? | I think you have to manually adjust it every time the month changes, but not sure, sure someone will correct me. |
Why does tiredness feel as though it comes in waves? | Biorhythms. Your body has cycles: breathing, heartbeat, blinking, even which nostril you use. Your wakefulness/tiredness is also cyclic.As you get more tired you're body tries harder and harder to send you to sleep. You will then reach an 'optimal' state of tiredness where you will probably be able to sleep within 30 m... |
how does your brain produce a coloured image through staring at a negative? | These are called afterimages and their existence is covered by something called Opponent Process Theory. Basically, you have 3 types of cells in your eye that detect color. They are called cones. One cone is sensitive to the wavelength of light we associate with "red", another to "green", and another to "blue" light. I... |
Why are most passwords hidden on-screen by default when you type them, but WIFI passwords are not? | Most on screen passwords are hidden in-case you have any shoulder surfers. WiFi passwords give you the option to either hide or show, in my opinion as WiFi passwords are normally longer than other account passwords they can be hard to make sure your typing correctly without seeing it', "With WiFi, the typical case is t... |
Why does time use the number 60? | 60 is easy to divide cleanly in multiple ways, and a number based on 60, such as the number of degrees in a circle, can be divided yet more ways. 60 can be divided by 1,2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20,30 and itself. This provides many easy-to-reckon, useful fractions. In the days before pocket calculators, slide rules, Napier's ... |
Why does water taste bitter after eating pineapples? | When the water hits your taste buds, they are stimulated a little. The problem is they have been overloaded with sugar and acid, thus they are temporarily unable to *report* sugar and acid at that moment. Therefore they report the only thing left: alkaline taste. Add that to the fact that most water has dissolved miner... |
What does fuel stabilizer do to gasoline? | Gasoline should keep indefinitely if stored properly. However, stabilisers can be useful if fuel is stored incorrectly, for example, in partially full tanks of small equipment. The larger tanks in modern cars are carefully designed to protect fuel from air and evaporation. Gasoline molecules can evaporate if the tank i... |
Hey Reddit, so what the hell are those squiggly lines I see in my peripheral every once in a while? Don't know why I didn't wonder until now.. | They are called floaters. Mostly they are the shadows cast by bits of the inside of your eye that have broken off and are floating around in the vitreous humor, or eyeball fluid, in your eye. _URL_0_ |
how a drug goes from needing a prescription to being able to buy it without a prescription | Like you're five? Because the grownups who make the drug showed the grownups who regulate the drug that the drug is safe enough to take without needing the advice from a doctor. The drug itself does the same thing only now you don't need a prescription from the doctor. People get easier access the the medicine, the dru... |
Is there a psychological term for when you finish a game/book/series and feel empty inside? | "Ennui" is a pretty close fit. Also, it's French and they're very good at feeling empty and dissatisfied inside. ennui: 1. a feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest; boredom: |
Why is it, that even though I genuinely love Whiskey, I shudder nearly every time I drink some? | Your conscious brain loves it, but your subconscious brain realizes that alcohol is inherently bad for the body, and causes you to shudder. It's a subconscious survival mechanism that you're overriding with your conscious brain. |
Why do our eyes not see color on the edge of our peripheral vision? | The cone cells that detect color aren't very good at low light or motion detection. Since motion detection is more important at the periphery than color we evolved to pack mostly rods and few cones in the corners. Your brain remembers what colors things are and will attempt to color in the peripheral vision so you don'... |
Why is it when I drink a glass of liquid I urinate at least twice as much back out? | Your bladder only sends the "time to pee" message to your brain when it reaches a certain level of fullness. So the amount you pee out doesn't just represent the glass of water you just drank, but all of the water you have drank since the last time you peed plus the water your body needed to dissolve the waste products... |
What prevents DNA from getting tangled? | Proteins! There are *many, many* proteins in your body that have a specific job of keeping your DNA tangled/condensed the perfect amount. There are topoisomerases, a family of proteins, that specifically twist/untwist your DNA to introduce/remove "supercoils" to condense it or expand it. There are some proteins like hi... |
Why does the tray in a microwave rotate? | Because there are hot and cooler spots due to the way the microwaves reflect around inside the oven. Rotating the food attempts to distribute the heat in the food more evenly. |
why child support is based on income rather than what a child would need monthly. | Child support is partially based on income. It is also partially based on the number of children and their age, the cost of basic living expenses and school in that general area, and whether or not any special needs are present. Which sometimes leads to a very high ratio, but that is also something that can happen when... |
How do blankets work? Why do they allow me to become warm even when the outside is cold? | your body makes heat. this warms the air around your skin. the blanket holds that air close to you. |
The different between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims. | Shi'ites think that leadership in Islam should be hereditary, and that Imams more or less represent the authority of the founder through his bloodline. Sunnis think that leadership in Islam should be by some sort of democratic process, and you don't need to be a descendant of the founder to hold authority. It started o... |
Why did film become a synonym for movies when photography also used film? | It depends on the context, but I'll stick to your examples. People didn't view still photographs on photographic film. They needed to be printed on photographic paper. Slides are an exception, but they didn't get popular until later. Motion picture film is negative and printed onto another piece of film to make a posit... |
The core beliefs of American political parties. | This is a difficult question, America is insanely vast. A Republican in New York is going to be much different from a republican in Texas. A democrat in California will be different from a democrat in Michigan. Any person that wants to run for major office with a likable chance of winning usually has to run under one o... |
How do broadcasters sell and maximize advertising revenue during live sports when they don't know how many commercial breaks there will be? | For American football games they know within one or two how many breaks there will be. On between possessions they will radio down and stop lay during the break a "TV timeout" and a dude in a bright colored red or yellow jacket will come out and stand with the ref until it is time to resume playThey know roughly how ma... |
Why when we are sick/have an infection does our body temperature go up, as in a fever? | Many infections grow best at particularly precise temperatures. Your body raises your temperature as a defense mechanism, slowing down the reproduction of the infectious agent and giving your own defenses a chance to 'catch up'. At the same time it enhances the ability of some of your body's defenders to move around mo... |
Why do real almonds not taste like almond paste/flavoring? | The almond flavour you taste in almond paste, marzipan and so forth comes from an aromatic called benzaldehyde. This is found in *bitter* almonds, which also have a fairly hefty amount of cyanide; the latter is removed during the extraction of the benzaldehyde. The almonds you eat in nut form are *sweet* almonds, which... |
Why haven't people as a whole adapted to the cold? We have adpated to the sun by the pigment in our skin changing colour depending on your exposure to sunlight. | Human's primary form of adaptation is the use of technology. So we have adapted to the cold by inventing insulated shelter, controlling fire, and making clothing.We grew intelligent enough to skin other warmer animals and wear their hides over our own.For the same reason we can't fly like a bird. The compromises necess... |
When I swallow a pill, why is there sometimes a heavy feeling in the back of my throat? | I used to get that feeling a lot when I first started taking my daily pills. Turns out I wasn't getting the pill "stuck" in my throat exactly, but I was not swallowing them with enough water. When someone swallows pills without proper salivation or lubricant the object can "scrape" itself on the back of your throat, le... |
Why is Reddit valued at "only" ~$1.8 billion, when less popular sites (e.g. Twitter) are worth many times more? | Reddit isn't publicly traded , so speculation can't inflate the value of the company like Twitter or Tesla. A company is basically worth how much people are willing to pay for shares of it, but you can't buy shares in Reddit yet. It's also not profitable, yet, which doesn't help. |
How can there be a sex wage gap in the US if we've had the Equal Pay Law since 1960? | There's a bit of a misconception about the wage gap. For jobs in the exact same role with the exact same responsibilities, the wages are about the same. However, men tend to be more likely to be promoted to higher-paying positions. Women are also more likely than men to take extended time off or work part time while ra... |
Why are sunglasses universally considered "cool"? | people use their eyes to communicate their level of comfort/aggression/submission with one another. shades will remove this information and allow others to fill in the blanks. for example, you might be avoiding eye contact, but because of your sunglasses this does not register with people and you seem undeservingly "co... |
How To Turn an Extra Wireless Router into a Wireless Extender | You may be better off in one of the tech subreddits . However, I have done this before with a Linksys router. Find out if one of the popular 3rd party firmwares or [Tomato]) will work on your router. Then find a guide online to help you set it up as a repeater. Make sure you read all instructions carefully, because you... |
What is the difference between quality sushi and regular sushi? | Fresh vs. Frozen - was it alive this morning? The Chef's reputation and experience - you're buying his car! The ambience isn't free, if you're having sushi at a Chinese buffet, it's mostly fake crab and Thai illegal immigrants doing the work. The exact kind of fish! You're not going to find supermarket fish at the Sush... |
Why do American cities often have to take large public transport projects such as light rail and metro system to the voters but don't have to do the same for massive highway and road construction? | Large road projects usually exist to keep the existing road network running, or to improve its relation to the rest of the city. Bridges need to be retrofitted, underpasses capped, tarmac replaced. They may be big projects, but they're really necessary to keep the system functioning like it is. A major public transport... |
How come bluetooth is so much slower than Wi-Fi? | Bluetooth is designed to be short-range very low-power for small portable equipment. Part of the power-savings of Bluetooth come from diminished bandwidth . One could speed up Bluetooth to Wi-Fi speeds, but then it would defeat the purpose of BT's major design feature. If you're looking for something that works like pl... |
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