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Well if you go back far enough currency was a specific metal, like gold, silver or copper. These metals had a value in the metal itself that did not matter what country issued them, so there was not any issue of counterfeiting as we know it. However people still found ways to scam you out of money. If you look on the e... |
This is very, very, very, nearly impossibly rare. I trained as an O R nurse in the US in the 1970's. We counted all the instruments before surgery and after. These numbers were written down both times. The patient's incision was not closed until the numbers were equal. Also, during surgery sponges were used. Not the ki... |
First off, the incompleteness theorems have absolutely nothing to do with a "theory of everything". A ToE is an idea in physics, something that can explain all physical phenomena within the bounds of a single theory. Goedel's incompleteness theorems are entirely mathematical/logical in nature, and do not argue against ... |
Because people generally want to know what a movie is about before they go see it and in the ~2 minutes a trailer lasts voiceover narration is the best way to communicate to the viewers what the movie is about. |
We don't have depth perception beyond about 10 meters. Anything further than that, your eyes are focused at infinity, and are pointing in the same direction. Beyond that, we use cues like its apparent size and brightness, or color shifts caused by the amount of air between you and the object (how a distant mountain loo... |
Its possible, but extremely rare, for a person to have different blood type sperm/egg than their actual blood type (a chimera). The odds of both parents being chimeras would be astronomical. Either someone's typed wrong, or you're adopted. There is a rare blood type called hh or Bombay phenotype. It will appear as type... |
Water has a delightful property: when water solidifies it's bond angles extend and it aligns into a lattice usually. That does 2 things. It makes the solid less dense, because there's more space between molecules, and it makes it sort of see-through. |
One of the design goals for what became the Internet was to be tolerant of failure. If some lines get cut, the Internet just routes around them. As long as there is still power and one intact line connecting that area to the rest of the world (whether it's a physical cable or a satellite link), the Internet will contin... |
Historically, every culture had their own measurements. Over time, we developed organizations to standardize these. Except for one country, everyone in the world uses a single system (metric). Even in the US, many types of commerce are increasingly in metric. There have been attempts to standardize language (Esperanto,... |
Because it has a wider impact range. Detonating on the ground has quite a bit of energy absorbed into the ground below it, instead of on the target location. Detonating in air allows it to spread out more, dealing more damage. It's a bit like how artillery shells are often set to detonate before impact. If they detonat... |
Words that often appear together are called "collocations", and it's simply the way we've learned them. We tend to process them as indivisible units -- phrases, rather than separate words. For example, when we say "apples and oranges", we're not thinking of two different kinds of fruit and then putting them in a list; ... |
Well, *originally*, it mostly dates back to the French "Age of Reason" after the French Revolution. They decided that it was going to be a whole new civilization and this was their chance to start over and do everything right. IIRC, they even took a crack at redefining the months of the calendar. In the end, the metric... |
Everything you can see has a real color. Silver is just gray, but it's surface is also shiny. We decided to not call it "shiny gray" but "silver." Because it's used often enough to need its own name. If you're talking about like the shiny silver that I think you are then... kind of? Think of it as more of a shade. Silv... |
[RT article]( URL_0 ) > It was previously thought that the organ was an unimportant group of structures, but it has now been classified as one single organ, which connects the abdomen to the intestine. It wasn't 'discovered' in the sense of some surgeon going 'Hey guys, what is this?' Researchers just found that a grou... |
The scanners would be dangerous to humans, if you went through the machine. That is why they make you put your carry on bags on the belt and walk you through the metal detector without bags. Different technologies. Trust me, they would rather just stick you on the belt. |
There is no formal procedure, nor an official record. It's essentially self-reporting. Most snipers operate with a spotter. The sniper says "I killed 'em." The spotter either confirms ("He killed 'em") or doesn't ("Couldn't see"). This goes into after-action reports, and that's about it. "Confirmed kills" is basically ... |
Your duodenum (the part after your stomach in the digestive tract) has Brunner glands which secrete a lot of HCO3- and neutralize the acid. This is necessary to prevent damage to the intestinal mucosa and to keep the pH under optimal conditions for the action of intestinal enzymes. The remaining part of your intestines... |
Petrol itself is not very flammable. It's when the petrol gas is mixed with air at just the right concentration that ignition can happen. For a fire you need 3 components: - Fuel - Heat - Oxygen In the fuel tank you're missing the heat. Only in the engine itself you have all 3 present. (the heat is the spark from the s... |
Because you associate the lyrics with a melody, and it's much easier for us to remember melodies than a sequence of text. Also because the lyrics rhyme and have a meter. A meter means a pattern of the number of syllables per line in a verse, with the stressed syllables alternating in a predictable way. Probably the mos... |
Vitamin B6 [certainly does]( URL_0 ) (I take it daily). I also happen to be wearing a nicotine patch to quit smoking and also take B12. Wow. This combination has added a realism to my dreams like none other. As to why nicotine aids in this, I can only find anecdotal reports in dream-related forums (like Reddit's) that ... |
Of all the artificial methods we know to transmit information through a vacuum, the electromagnetic spectrum is pretty much what we can both send and receive; there may be other theoretical concepts, but radio, and light, and various other points along the electromagnetic spectrum are what we have to work with. It's no... |
Most of that territory is inaccessible. If you want to hike over mountains and through swamp, well, I guess we will catch you when you reach the town on the other end. A lot of borders actually do have some kind of fence all along them. It could just be wire that sends an alarm if tripped, and then a border guard patro... |
Its an old wife's tale. A fever is a natural response from your immune system. If you starve yourself during that you also starve your immune system. It just people have a tenancy to throw up and keep nothing down during a fever so they tend to feed them less/they eat less. Not throwing up is important because it dehyd... |
Because they all are randomly out of tune, but just slightly, so they add up around the proper notes. On average you get a sound that is more intense around the right notes and their harmonics (which makes it sound non-dissonant), and the out of tune sounds just becomes a bunch of overtones making the sound a richer an... |
Because people don't know what to do with their hands. They choose to "strike a pose" instead of perhaps appearing awkward. EDIT: The peace sign is just an example. People the world over use a variety of different signs but for the same purpose. |
The "12 steps" are arbitrary, but the relationship between the frequencies is not: at the distance which we call 'one octave' the higher of the two tones results from vibrations which are exactly twice as fast as the lower tone. This means that it sounds "the same only higher" to our ears. Meanwhile, we in the West dec... |
So, we actually moved a house and the process is pretty cool. We bought a house at auction for less than 3000 dollars and moved it. This was about 15 years ago. Step 1 remove the roof. Labeling the pieces for easy reassembly. Step 2 depending on how many stories the house is you place supporting beams along the floor j... |
Laughing is primarily a team building social activity so there's no real reason to laugh if no one else is in the room. It's similar to yawning in that when you laugh, others are more likely to feel good and laugh, and vice versa which makes group laughter a self reinforcing process. As I recall there are actually reli... |
Regular pasta is *much* more popular, so it is produced by many more factories, so there is more competition. Competition keeps the price down. No experience with such pasta, but I live in a rice country. Brown rice, the less-processed kind, is less popular and are made only by premium brands which target the health-co... |
Generally speaking, in an academic setting a theory is a proposed explanation for a set of data points that provides insight into the underlying workings or at least underlying formula that produced that data. Hence the theory of plate tectonics explains various geological features by proposing plates floating on magma... |
Humans are very social animals (i.e. social interactions are crucial to our survival), so we have lots of traits that exist only to act as signals in communication. As far as I know, we cry for the same reason we smile or raise our eyebrows - to signal our emotions to others. I have also heard about there being pheromo... |
The 16:9 size was chosen as a compromise between the wider shape of most movies, and the narrower shape of older TV shows. This way neither one looks ridiculous. In the beginning, Edison decided that movies should be 4:3. Then television was developed and they followed the 4:3 convention. As television got popular movi... |
A trust fund is money someone has set aside for your *benefit* but it is not under your *control.* The money is under the control of the *trustee* who invests or spends it for the benefit of the *beneficiary*. This is typically done so that people can pass along wealth to their children, but without the risk that the c... |
There are stages of sleep where you take in next to no outside information--you are dead to the world, basically. There are lighter stages of sleep where you take in more information and can be easily woken up. We cycle through many stages in a night of normal sleep, which means there will be several points during the ... |
Now that you mention it...Coconut oil will absorb on my upper body but just sits on my legs. It doesn't even help with the ash. You can see the ash under the oil if you look closely. Do they? I have never heard of this I figure it depends on the oil used, and how much of it they use. AFAIK, oils do not get "absorbed", ... |
(Edit: I clarified my answer after many pointed out that it is misleading to say that the placebo effect *proves* wishful cures. Please also see other answers.) There are a ton of reasons why a placebo might work: * there is a mind-body connection and psychosomatic therapies are valid * people pretend or believe themse... |
Most of the filming for a movie can be done in a couple of months, the rest of the time is editing, adding CG effects, marketing and waiting for the right time to release the movie. A lot of work is also done beforehand to write and edit the script, scouting locations for filming and getting permits, hiring staff and m... |
Poisons work in a lot of different ways. Cyanide. It doesn't get turned into a 'not poisonous' cyanide by the liver. There is no such thing. Cyanide works by blocking the cells ability to uptake oxygen. Very small amount, there's no issue, as the amount of cyanide can't effect enough cells to have a negative effect. Ge... |
Hashing is destructive. To take an easy example that's easier to wrap your head around, we can make our own hashing algorithm. For simplicity, imagine we have a password system where users have 4-digit pin codes as passwords. So a real simple hash would be something like this: 1. Pick a number between 1111 and 9999 (34... |
Hacking generally means using a computer to gain unauthorized access to data in a system. So anything where you steal files from someone's computer is hacking. In most cases when people hack passwords from a database, they steal what are called the hashed passwords. To understand what that means, you have to know what ... |
They don't "need to" necessarily, but that's just how Reddit has their site mapping set up |
If you are alone, what are your odds of being eaten when a predator comes along? 100% If you are in a school of 100 fish, what are the odds of being eaten when a predator comes along? 1% Schooling provides two benefits: First, it reduces the odds of any one individual being eaten. Two, many predators don't have that gr... |
Fiscal years are used by government and some businesses (usually mid-to-large businesses) concerning money. As to why they don't use a traditional calendar year, [here is one reason]( URL_0 ): > December is a really bad month to try to close out an entire year's accounting books. Accountants and execs are on vacation f... |
> but the pressure of the entire Earth compressing the core isn't enough to explain the heat. Constant pressure doesn't cause an increase in heat either, so you are correct the pressure is irrelevant. The kinetic energy of the formation would have resulted in a lot of heat too but it would have cooled long ago. The cor... |
It's not your brain that hurts during a headache; it's the nerves and stuff around your head/scalp/skull that have pain receptors. "A headache or cephalalgia is pain anywhere in the region of the head or neck. ... The brain tissue itself is not sensitive to pain because it lacks pain receptors. Rather, the pain is caus... |
Because the simple characters have special meaning in certain contexts. In a web page, for example, you use < > to tell the browser about the structure of the page. If I wanted to make a paragraph with red text, I would write < p style="color:red" > This text would be red < /p > If I want a literal < or > , I need a wa... |
[The wiki article may be a good general place to start]( URL_0 ). In music, any chord of two notes (or more, but we'll just stick with two here) can be described as augmented, major, minor, or diminished in terms of the sound produced. However, there are two special chords (the fifth and the fourth) which are neither m... |
What is the Big Bang? --- The origin of your confusion seems to be the very common misconception that the big bang originated from one point in space. That is not true. But let's back up a little:The observable universe is the sum of all points in space that are causally connected to earth. That means, it is a sphere a... |
They're a lot easier for people to remember and to key in. Which are you more likely to do: text "FREEGIFT" to 66066, or text it to 2068794482? |
The Federal Government "borrows" money from the people by issuing Federal Bonds and printing more cash, which devalues whatever money you have in your pocket. Hypothetical situation. 2017 budget rolls around, we have a $1 trillion deficit. The Fed issues $1 trillion in bonds and prints that much in cash. If there's $10... |
I would assume that you are talking about Alcohol deydrogenase. enzymes can be specific for certain molecules up to a point in their active site(where the molecule of interest attaches), they just kinda look for certain parts on a molecule, like groups like alcohol groups and their sizes, that sort of thing. So imagine... |
If the social media market starts to gravitate towards Snapchats or livestreams, etc it means users could use other platforms to share content and information which means they become less relevant. They are also working on different ways to monetize the live streaming with ads so they maintain revenue. This is revenue ... |
Your mind is not independent from your body. You "feel" stressed because your body is releasing chemicals, raising your heart rate, etc. Every emotion you have does something to your body. In some cases, like fear, your body causes the emotion before you have time to think about it. |
Fur, fire and fat. Humans quickly learned that stealing the skin from furry animals makes a nice cozy coat. Even today, a traditional fur parka will work better than even the higher tech synthetic varieties. When humans are moving around, we're pretty good in the cold. When we're sitting around, like at home, we sat ar... |
Colors are a response your brain makes to picking up certain wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation striking receptor cells in your brain. When this happens, those cells send signals to your brain, and your brain creates the image. Certain combinations of stimulation on those cells cause your brain to generate differ... |
Long story short, bandwidth gets you fast downloads, low latency gets you fast gaming, and packet loss hurts both. Bandwidth is a limit of the network capacity, and data caps placed on your account by your network provider so that you get the speed you paid for but no more. Latency is a matter of the switching performa... |
I think you mean [orthostatic hypotension]( URL_0 ), which is basically just a quick drop in blood pressure while your heart catches up with the sudden need to work a bit harder now that you stood up. For the moment while it catches up, the low blood pressure in your brain can cause experiences close to fainting (dizzi... |
"Obamacare" is actually called the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act", but was renamed "Obamacare" by Republicans in an attempt to make Republicans/Conservatives/Alt-Righters dislike the act before they knew what it was because is was being associated with Obama (whom they already hated for many reasons - ano... |
Take a puzzle with 1000 pieces, throw them on the ground. You'll probably generate a huge mess. Repeat this often. Sometimes two pieces that fit together will land next to each other. Repeat this really, really often. Once in a while, all 1000 pieces will land at their right spot. Our brain is a bit like a puzzle - jus... |
You get the transcript and search them (or better yet, the captions for a video, since it's already time tagged). There are commercial services that have the transcripts for practically everything and there is software that can DVR shows and stuff with closed captions which can be searched. There are ways to search the... |
A bunch of people aren't reporting their income, mostly because it's gained through illegal means (like the black market). This income is kept hidden in their homes generally, and isn't stored in banks. In order to combat this, the Indian government surprised everyone by suddenly announcing that all their most common b... |
Saluting has a long history that is actually not written in stone. However one explanation is that it was originally used as a greeting between two knights to show their face and thus not be seen as an enemy. Additionally it would take away from their master hand to hold their weapon. This has progressed through to whe... |
Imma answer your question, but first let me tell you about this time I watered the lawn on a warm july afternoon, there were clouds in the sky and childrens laughter.... ok seriously, who knows, maybe they just like to hear themselves type, or create an emotional connection to the recipe, perhaps they are just killing ... |
The thing about brains is that there's always a lot of stuff happening all over, such that it's hard to tell what's going on at any given point. Getting useful data from them usually requires a lot of averaging; the colorful brain scans you often see really only represent slightly increased or decreased activation. In ... |
URL_0 There's a link to the same question /u/js569 explains: There are two types of sensations, fine and crude. Pain is an example of a crude sensation and touch is an example of a fine sensation. Both crude and fine sensory pathways are activated together, and when they are, the fine sensations generally overwhelm the... |
The air doesn't have to be "new." Mold spores can lay dormant for a significant amount of time before starting to grow. If there's mold growing inside a sealed container then the spores went in before it was sealed. They are in the container, because you put them in there, however unwillingly, along with whatever food ... |
There is a whole list of ways. Shrapnel- basically really sharp bits of things flying through your body and tearing you apart. Heat- explosions generate a lot of heat. If you are close to the explosion and survive everything else the heat will most likely kill you. Shockwave- this is the big one. When there is an explo... |
Carbonated means that the liquid has Carbon Dioxide dissolved in it. When you shake a bottle of soda, the Carbon Dioxide is 'released' from the liquid and expands, building pressure in the bottle. |
Because your car also has a big side profile and wind has a big force. 3000 pounds doesn't mean you're immovable. A gentle 10mph Wind can move sail ships tens of thousands of pounds given enough sail area. wind hit the sides and gets underneath, and while your car weighs 3000 lbs, it had shocks that are built to move/r... |
It could stay hidden from direct observation from Earth, but it would be easy to detect with indirect methods. For example, its gravitational effects on other planets, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft would be immediately obvious. No. The solar system started to be discovered by direct observations but then we started... |
In three dimensional space, we can find three directions that are orthogonal to the other two direction. In four dimensional space, we can find four such directions. There really is no way for our three dimensional brains to visualize a four dimensional space, but is is absolutely trivial to describe it mathematically.... |
Motorcycles used to be more common as a daily driver and even utility vehicle. People might not afford a car or a car driver license. Adding a side car makes a motorcycle much more useful as a daily driver. A worker might have lots of tools in the sidecar, you could go grocery shopping with the bike and even take your ... |
It's a bad movie with a bad script and, somehow, actors usually considered good. It's lameness, coupled with the effort taken to actually produce and distribute the thing, make it a unique candidate for recognition on an Internet that likes laughing at people who try too hard. That's my take on it, any way. |
It can only be so the mail carrier doesn't have to get out and walk up to each house if they have extended lawns/driveways. With mailboxes right at the street they can drive straight down the line, saving tons of time and hitting more addresses in a day. In general, it makes it easier for the mail deliverer to do their... |
All things considered, the US is a really right wing country. To the point that Hillary Clinton would have been the equivalent of a tea party candidate in most European countries. In that sense, your question asking about left wing extremism is kinda moot since there basically aren't any left wing extremists. Radical c... |
It's not smoke, it's particles of water vapour that are condensing and sublimating into minuscule droplets and ice crystals. The most plentiful product of combustion is water. It looks like smoke for the same reason you can see your breath when you exhale in the cold. When the car moves the water disperses in the cold,... |
Money. They need the income to fund the continued development of the game. This is a practice that software developers have been using for a very long time. It is not just games either but OS and network gear. They all do some amount of 'sell to fund' and it doesn't seem to hurt them because people still are buying. Le... |
There are no *perfectly* flat objects being made today. Even the mirrors on giant telescopes have fluctuations on the surface. If one wanted to make a fairly flat stone surface with only stone tools available one could use water in a bucket and grind a disk (or whatever) so that the edges and surface are even with the ... |
When you are lying or sitting your blood pressure rises slightly due to position. When you stand the pressure drops. Blood can pool in your legs making it unavailable for your brain. If this is happening often you should probably see a doctor. This isn't healthy. It's often caused by low blood pressure or dehydration. ... |
Votes were tabulated on paper in each local polling place. Then the results from each place (signed by local authorities) were gathered and taken to a regional capital for totaling. Then, if necessary, *these* signed totaling sheets were gathered and taken to a bigger city for final totaling. Auditors could inspect the... |
The mesentery got a promotion in name from supportive tissue (to the small and large intestines) to apparently the classification of organ. It's always been there. We've known about it for a long time. General surgeons who work in the abdomen cut and slice into the mesentery all the time when resecting bowel. It's not ... |
It releases hormones that feel good, such as oxytocin. Why does it release hormones like that? Because a kiss is a good way to determine the health and immunological compatibility of a mate. If it is good, hormone are released and you want to do it again, because you get a good response from the partner. This encourage... |
Light is bent or refracted by whatever it passes through. In a room of uniform temperature, the light is bent the same way everywhere so you see a uniform image. Heat causes turbulence in the air so the light is bent in a more chaotic manner. You're seeing this as a wavy image in the shadow. This is also what causes mi... |
This is a huge generalisation and will work differently based on the game but generally a quick save on console will delete when you pick it back up whereas a normal save can be accessed at any time. On a pc a quick save would just mean you don't pick which save slot to use. Again, huge generalisation, that's just how ... |
There is the 500/600 rule. Basically take 600 (500 to be safe) and divide it by your lens' focal length, that will tell you how many seconds you can expose for without getting star trails (where you see the stars move). Now, that is for full frame (35mm) sensors, I believe Nikon sensors have a 1.5x crop radio, so it sh... |
Look up Ben Hecks ps4 and xbox teardowns on YouTube, the main difference as I remember is the xbox has an oversized heat sink as a precaution against the overheating issues of the 360 |
Paint is a liquid when you apply it and after a bit becomes a solid. What is happening is that the paint is dissolved in a solvent, which evaporates off as it is applied, allowing it to solidify. If you were to apply another solvent capable of dissolving the paint again, it will redissolve. The lemongrass essential oil... |
So I'm assuming what you're asking is: why is it that a gunshot to the brain is so catastrophically fatal, when it's been shown that you can damage that organ and come out of it alive? Pointing to the example of [Phineas Gage]( URL_0 ), who survived an entire pole being thrust through his brain by an explosive charge. ... |
Imagine you run a taxi business that runs from Point A to Point B. You take passengers between only these two points. You overhear that some of your passengers mention they like to travel from Point C to Point D with another taxi business on occasion. So you strike an agreement with the other business to allow your cus... |
Programming languages are like real-life languages. There are times one may be easier to communicate in - like speaking French when you're in France - but for the most part they all communicate the same things. If you want to program a sensor to detect when you press a button on a remote and then do something, you'll p... |
Starch is used as poster glue. The gluten in wheat additionally makes the strands of starch molecules link together to make a tough solid. |
As far as dolls and clowns go, the scary feeling might be due to the "uncanny valley". This refers to the observation that the more an inanimate object has human characteristics (in appearance and movement), the more an observer feels an affinity for it. For example, a stuffed animal elicits feelings of warmth and cute... |
Say a website is using an SSL certificate. That certificate is just something that says something like "I am reddit and nobody can impersonate me". Now obviously SSL certificates websites offer up can simply be copied, so to authenticate themselves, the certificate includes a public key, and they have their private key... |
A deep space radio wave is just what the name describes - a radio wave coming from deep space (one has recently been pinpointed to come from another galaxy some 3 billion light years away, which I assume is why you're asking this question). They're short, they're rare, they're mysterious, and nobody knows exactly what ... |
Some other commenters have covered really well how it's still *transmitting*, so I'll cover a bit of how we're *receiving*. The signals Voyager transmits are really weak when they get here, and there's a lot of noise in the electromagnetic spectrum, so the signals are way weaker than the noise. "But wait" you might say... |
If you're asking about when your browser asks you if you want to save a password, it's saving it inside your browser's memory or inside your browser company's cloud-based databases. If you're asking about when you have an account on some website, they store all of your account information inside a database, which is ba... |
A color changing LED isn't one LED in a package but three LEDs along with a small computer to drive them. The LED is made up of red, green and blue LEDs each of which can be controlled by a microcontroller. Since the two legs on the LED that supply the power are connected to the microcontroller and not the LED elements... |
Take two successive numbers of Fibonacci sequence, 13 and 21 for example. 21/13 will be close to golden ratio. Kepler proved that limit of ratio of two infinitely large successive Fibonacci numbers is golden ratio, or lim{n - > inf} F{n+1}/Fn = phi. EDIT: More general form, as wikipedia says, is lim{n - > inf} F{n+a}/F... |
Every theorem has a proof, an answer to the question of "why is that true?". For axioms, the "why?" is a non-provable value statement. It's true because we want it to be true, rather than due to any particular proof. In general, axioms will be so simple and fundamental that they are clearly never going to be discovered... |
Anxiety is a good thing. It's what kept us alive and what gave us our fight or flight response. So it's extremely useful and vital. However in a world where sleeping with spiders and sleeping in trees no longer exist, our Anxiety still does. Our brains haven't really caught up with our lives. And the complexity of our ... |
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