Question: Why is the formula for Coca-cola a secret? Can't they analyse a sample and determine the amounts of each ingredient?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why is the formula for Coca-cola a secret? Can't they analyse a sample and determine the amounts of each ingredient?

[ URL_0 ]( URL_0 ) An interesting case related to this. A top Coca Cola exec tried to sell the formula to Pepsi for mad cash. Pepsi snitched em up to Coca Cola and the FBI immediately. The messaging around that which Pepsi put out was that they wanted to play fair. But what would Pepsi gain from producing a product identical to coca cola? Nothing. It would be tantamount to confessing that Coca Cola was making a superior product all along and demolish their product differentiation and their unique selling point that they were not coca cola. Honestly I think the whole secret recipe thing is just really good marketing. Makes this sugar water look like some kind of miracle elixir.


Question: Is there a specific psychological reason people don't like hearing their voice?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 Is there a specific psychological reason people don't like hearing their voice?

(I’m not 100% sure this is the correct answer) It’s not that we don’t like to hear our own voice, but rather, we don’t like to hear recordings of our own voice. Every time we speak, we hear our voice. But we also hear it through the vibration of our skull, which makes it sound deeper than it really is. But in our mind, this is how our voice really sounds. When we hear a recording, we hear our real voice. To everyone else, it sounds normal. But to us, it sounds really high pitched. This is because we are used to hearing ourself with a much deeper voice than we really have. Something similar happens with mirrors. We are used to seeing ourself with a mirror, which flips left and right. Now, I should point out, nobody has a completely symmetrical face. But for most people, you don’t really notice the asymmetry. So, we are really used to seeing our own reflection. This means that any small change to our face would be really obvious to us. It also means that when we see our face how it really looks - and not flipped, like in a mirror - we immediately notice all the asymmetries and think we don’t look good in the photo. This is why many phones use a flipped image for the selfie camera


Question: VPNs. Are they for people to do illegal stuff on? How do they work? Why would I want one or not?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 VPNs. Are they for people to do illegal stuff on? How do they work? Why would I want one or not?

A VPN can be used to form a private tunnel trough the internet for protecting the data you need to transfer. Imagine you are making a video game and your team is spread around the world in different countries. Your team members need access to the game source code, which is of course a tightly guarded secret so your competitors cannot steal your cool new groundbreaking video game. Making that source code available to the internet, even if it's protected by a password, is dangerous. There's a possibility of someone cracking your password or intercepting the data as someone on your team accesses it. What you want is that only people inside your private network can access the source code. You cannot have a physical private network because your team is not in the same location, so you create a Virtual Private Network or VPN for short. By having access to your virtual network, your team can safely access the source code trough the VPN tunnel without anyone being able to intercept it. Edit: Thanks u/derpdederpmustang


Question: How would an interplanetary civilization measure time?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 How would an interplanetary civilization measure time?

If they have FTL travel without timey-wimey effects, they'd probably use the standard time on the home planet. If multi-racial, they would probably decide which species' system is used through war or diplomacy. If their FTL travel DOES come with time dilation, then they would probably not be traveling to and from frequently enough for them to use a standard system. Any communication would take years just to send a message and get a reply. Any dealings between colonies would probably work on an "It'll get there when it gets there" system.


Question: What is the difference between Auschwitz 1, 2, and 3?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 What is the difference between Auschwitz 1, 2, and 3?

These three camps were part of the Auschwitz camp network but they were built at different times (Auschwitz 1 was built first, then 2, then 3). Auschwitz 2 was a combined concentration camp and "extermination" camp (where they committed mass murder), and Auschwitz 3 specifically provided labor to a chemical company called IG Farben.


Question: Why is cannibalism so bad for our health?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why is cannibalism so bad for our health?

Diseases often have trouble jumping from one species to another. The closer related to you your food is (evolution wise) the smaller the gap the disease needs to jump. This is why eating bushmeat from apes is more risky than eating some less closely related animals. The above is true especially for viruses. Parasites are another problem. One thing that has been big in the news are prions. Prions aren't really living things at all. They are just certain types of proteins which cause the proteins inside of you to become like them by their mere presence. In particular the prions everyone is worried about are ones that are inside your brain and nerves. If you eat another humans brain who has such a prion disease you will become infected yourself. Normally this is not such a big deal as people aren't in the habit of eating each others brains. However in cultures where cannibalism was practiced, such disease can become a problem. One example is Kuru also called the laughing diseases which used to be found among cannibals in places like New Guinea. Another example is mad cow diseases which became a problem when stupid people got into the habit of feeding cows the ground down remains (including brains) of other cows. In fact mad cow became such a big problem that enough cows with it ended up in the food chain to possibly infect humans despite the species gap. Creutzfel-Jacobs is what the disease is called that many think is what happened if you eat cannibalistic cow brains. The TL;DR of all this is that if you plan to eat humans make sure to only pick healthy looking ones, stay away from their brains and avoid eating any known cannibalis who seem to have the shakes.


Question: Why are different people's "attention span"/ the amount of time the commit to something different? And how can I improve mine?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why are different people's "attention span"/ the amount of time the commit to something different? And how can I improve mine?

Turn off your phone, and pick up a book. Read until you've finished the book. Turn your phone back on. If you choose to live in a world of constant interruption, you are teaching your brain to agilely jump from topic to topic every 15 seconds. This gives you a 15 second attention span. If that's not what you want, stop training your brain that way. It will be hard, because a lot of advertisers make a lot of money taking advantage of your short attention span. Who's the boss of you? You or them? That's a question you have to answer for yourself.


Question: How does music and copyright work on platforms such as Twitch, YouTube, and movies?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 How does music and copyright work on platforms such as Twitch, YouTube, and movies?

There is no such thing as plagiarism in real life. Whether you give credit or not is completely irrelevant as to whether your use of a copyrighted work is infringing. Either you have the right to use it, in which case you don't need to provide credit (unless that's part of your license agreement), or you don't and its infringing. Whether you make money from your use of the work is also irrelevant. Either you have the right to use the work, in which case you can make money with it, or you don't and its infringing. "Fair use" is a concept in copyright law that covers a handful of very specific situations. There is only one of these situations that a normal person could ever find themselves in and that's fair use to review a work. If you're making a video in which you review something else you can give a description of that thing and use very brief snippets of it in your video. What the internet thinks is "parody" is actually satire. Parody requires that your mockery of the work be for political purposes. Satire is any other form of mockery. Its very, very difficult to create a mockery of a commercial work in such a way that it would be considered a parody. Satire is explicitly not protected as fair use. People are able to upload videos to the big video hosting sites because those sites have agreements in place with the major content publishers concerning what can be uploaded and how that content can be monetized. Typically if you upload content that you don't have the right to use then the video gets to stay up, but any money it makes goes to the rights-holder. Twitch's agreements allow content producers to have music playing in the background of their livestreams so long as it is incidental to whatever they're streaming. However, the videos of those livestreams get muted. If you want to be able to monetize someone else's copyrighted work on youtube you can do so, but you need to get a license to use the work (which means paying the rights-holder). There are a couple of big rights clearing houses that handle licensing. ASCAP and BMI are the main two for music, but a lot of smaller ones have popped up recently. Things like movies and TV shows typically aren't licensed to individuals.


Question: How were the values of constants such as e and pi historically determined, and why do these constants find themselves in so many formulae?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 How were the values of constants such as e and pi historically determined, and why do these constants find themselves in so many formulae?

As you probably know, pi is intimately connected with circles. Whether you regard pi as the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter or the ratio of its area to the square of its radius, etc., pi can be seen to be connected with circles. It should come as no surprise that you can find pi whenever you're working with circles. Circles come up all the time in math even if you have to squint pretty hard to find the circle. For example, many of the occurrences of pi have to do with trigonometric functions like sine, cosine, and tangent. These functions can be thought of as relating an angle (which is really part of a circle under a loose definition of "part" and "circle") to the ratio of sides of a right triangle having that angle. These functions come up in geometry and trigonometry, of course, but they also come up in waves. (For some motivation here, look at the graph of the sine function). Waves are very important in physics for a number of reasons, notably electromagnetic radiation. (Whether this is really a wave or a particle or both or neither is the topic of a whole other eli5, but suffice it to say that even in answering this question properly you come to things called wave functions.) f(x) = e^x is a unique function because the "slope" of the function (technically the derivative if you know a little calculus, if not imagine drawing a straight line that just touches the curve at one point, almost bouncing off, and taking the slope of that with rise over run) at a point is equal to the value of the function at that point. This is one of the reasons e crops up everywhere because it represents exponential growth. When the rate at which something is changing is related to the amount of something there is at a given time, look for an exponent. Of course lots of numbers could be used for an exponent, but because e^x's slope equals its value (rather than being proportional to the value like 2\^x, for example) e is often how mathematicians will write the equation. Since a^x == e^(ln[a] x), for any positive a, any time you see an exponent you could rewrite it in terms of e. (For an explanation of this fact consider the rules of exponents and that ln(x) is the inverse function of e^x, so e^(ln x) == x and ln(e^x)== x). Another reason the two numbers come up so often is actually a deep connection between trigonometric functions and e^x. In order to understand this relationship properly you need to understand Taylor series. A Taylor series is an infinite sum. By that I mean the sum has an infinite number of terms, not that the value of it is infinite. It turns out that if the things you're adding shrink fast enough you can add an infinite number of things and still get a finite number. Anyway, what a Taylor series does is approximate a function by an infinite sum of polynomial terms. Intuitively, you can approximate a function around some value, a, by looking at the value of the function at a, f(a). This works for that point, but probably not for points near a like a+0.000001. To get a little better, you can approximate a function by a straight line passing through f(a) but having the same "slope" at that point. To get a little bit better still you could approximate the function by a parabola, g, which has the same value at a, the same slope at a, and the same slope of the slope at a. That is g(a) = f(a), g'(a) = f'(a), and g''(a) = f''(a). You can keep this process going forever and you do a better and better job of approximating the function. Ok, where does e come into this? Well, back before we mentioned that the slope of e^x at x is simply e^x. That means when we were taking the slope and the slope of the slope, etc., we kept getting things that look like e^x. I didn't mention it above but in order to use all of those slopes you have to scale by some constants that don't really matter for our purposes at the moment. In any case, e^x 's self similarity means that the Taylor series for it at x= 0 looks like this: x^0/0! + x^1/1! + x^2/2! + x^3/3!... which is one of the prettiest Taylor series you can have. All right, that's e, but what does that have to do with sine and cosine? Well, sine and cosine have similar properties to e^x. The slope function of sin(x) isn't sin(x), but it's cos(x). And the slope function of cos(x)? Well, that's just -sin(x). This means that the slope function of the slope function of sin(x) is -sin(x). It's not quite self-similarity, but it's pretty close to it. Because sin(0) = 0, the value at zero of the slope of the slope of sin(x) is also 0, and this holds true for any even number of "slope function of"s. You can make a similar argument for cos(x) but with odd numbers. Well, this means that the Taylor series for sin(x) around x=0 ends up being x/1! -x^3/3! + x^5/5! -x^7/7! + x^9/9!... and cos(x)'s ends up as 1/0! - x^2/2! +x^4/4!... Well, if you squint you might already be able to see a connection between sin(x), cos(x) and e^x, but we'll drive forwards a bit more. I'll assume you're familiar with i, the imaginary unit, the square root of -1. Some people struggle with imaginary numbers because they don't show up too obviously in ordinary life, but, believe it or not, they're there. You just have to look for them. If you don't like imaginary numbers you probably won't like what happens next, but it's pretty cool. It turns out we can make sense of something like e^(ix) even though that seems a little strange. How can we make sense of it? Taylor series! e^(ix) == (ix)^0/0! + (ix)^1/1! + (ix)^2/2! + (ix)^3/3!... A little bit of algebra will let us factor that series into something like (1/0! - x^2/2! +x^4/4!...) + (ix/1! -ix^3/3! + ix^5/5! -ix^7/7! + ix^9/9!... ) == cos(x) + i sin(x). Whoa, that was crazy! It is from this fact that we have e^(i pi) = -1 since e^(i pi) == cos(pi) + i sin(pi) = -1 + 0 = -1. One of my favourite surprising occurences of pi is in the probability distribution for the standard normal, or Gaussian, distribution. This distribution is the famous bell curve you may have heard about. The Central Limit Theorems in statistics tell us that the sum of lots of little distributions approximate a normal distribution if you sum enough things. It's this theorem that helps explain why things like height of males or height of females within a population tends to follow something that looks like a bell curve. When you try to get a formula for this magical distributions others converge to you end up working with infinite series again and for detailed reasons that probably can't be eli5'd e pops up again. Through this e, pi pops up too! Now we have the circle constant showing up for population structure statistics. That's pretty weird at first glance. Now for how they could be calculated. One way to calculate pi is to draw a circle, measure its diameter, measure is circumference, and divide the circumference by the diameter. This works well enough for getting an approximation like 3.14 but it's tough to get an approximation too much closer than that because you're relying on how well you can draw a perfect circle and how well you can measure. Another way pi was calculated, historically, is a method famously associated with Archimedes. Imagine drawing a triangle with all sides and angles equal. A polygon with all sides and angles equal is called a regular polygon. Now imagine that the triangle has its points lying on a circle. We'll call this a circle circumscribing the triangle. It may not be obvious that you can draw a circle like that, but you can. Now imagine the same circle, but we'll draw a triangle around the circle with the edges of the triangle just touching the circle. Now we'll say the circle is inscribing the triangle. If you think a little bit, it should be clear that the perimeter of the inner triangle is less than the perimeter (or circumference) of a circle. Similarly, the perimeter of the outer triangle is greater than the circumference. It turns out you can do the same thing for regular polygons with any number of sides. The more sides you have, the closer the shapes will look to a circle, and the closer their perimeters will be, but the circle that's inscribing one and circumscribing the other will always have a circumference in between their perimeters. There's a fairly nice way to calculate the perimeter of a regular polygon and the diameter of its inscribing/circumscribing circle without doing any measuring. That means we can pick some really big number of sides and get two perimeters that are very close together. Once we've done that, we know that the circumference is somewhere in between. Now we just divide the estimated circumference by the calculated diameter and we have an estimate for pi. This method was popular for over 1000 years, but it was eventually beat out by methods involving infinite series (which probably have something to do with circles if you squint hard enough and look for trigonometric functions). Human knowledge of e is a lot younger than human knowledge of pi. We've only known about e since somewhere around the 1600s. Because of this, there's less history about how it was calculated. There are lots of ways to calculate it just like there are lots of ways to calculate pi. Almost all of them look at infinite series in some way. If you've been paying attention you might see that you could use a Taylor series for e^x (around 0) evaluated at x =1 to calculate e. This method works reasonably well and it's relatively simple so it's a good way to think about it. There are lots of other ways to calculate it, though, and I'm guessing this wasn't the first way it was done, but maybe.


Question: How do we know what the structure of molecules look like? It's not like we can check everything under a microscope, can we?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 How do we know what the structure of molecules look like? It's not like we can check everything under a microscope, can we?

There are quite a few methods! Mass spectroscopy helps to determine how molecules are broken up and their weight, which can be used to piece things together. X-ray crystallography determines the location of atoms directly. Model calculations can be used for structure prediction/reactivity. Infrared spectroscopy tells you about bonds. NMR spectroscopy determines the environment of specific atoms in a molecule. There are more methods as well but those are a few of the main ones :)


Question: What is a Chaos Theory and how does it work?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 What is a Chaos Theory and how does it work?

If you were to try and model how the planets move around the solar system, you would find that you could create a very accurate model despite not necessarily having perfect information about everything in the solar system. There's a bunch of asteroids floating around, the mass of the planets and the sun are close approximations, etc. But even if your info is off a little bit, all that really does is change the final result an equally tiny amount. This is how we tend to think things work - a small change to initial conditions results in a roughly equally small change to the end results. Not all systems behave this way however - take a [Double Pendulum]( URL_0 ) for example. In the gif, you see three double pendulums of identical construction, starting from nearly the same position - so close in fact that you really can't tell the difference. But very quickly that initial difference in position causes each double pendulum to take drastically different trajectories. This wild difference is the result of the starting position being off just a teeny tiny amount. A system like this is highly sensitive to initial conditions. This is a "Chaotic" system.


Question: how did water appear in Earth and how did we end up with such vast amount of it?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 how did water appear in Earth and how did we end up with such vast amount of it?

Water is Hydrogen + Oxygen, two of the most abundant things on Earth. Much of the Earths crust is made up of Oxygen, bonded to other things like Iron to make minerals. Since a lot of Oxygen existed on the primeval Earth, and Hydrogen is the most abundant thing in the Universe, having water was inevitable. So where did it come from? Either the Earth was formed from material that contained a lot of Oxygen and Water, or the early Earth was bombarded with Comets and Asteroids that contained Oxygen and Water.


Question: If the phases of the moon are due to the Earths shadow, why is the half moon a straight line/perfect semi circle, instead of a rounded shadow?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 If the phases of the moon are due to the Earths shadow, why is the half moon a straight line/perfect semi circle, instead of a rounded shadow?

Unless you're looking at a lunar eclipse, the part of the moon that's not lit up is not in the Earth's shadow, it's in the moon's shadow. The bright portion is facing the sun, and is therefore illuminated, and the dark portion is facing away from the sun, and therefore not illuminated.


Question: Why is the meat of different animals so different in color? e.g. beef and chicken (or, taking it one step further, salmon)

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why is the meat of different animals so different in color? e.g. beef and chicken (or, taking it one step further, salmon)

it's a mixture of factors. Redness is determined by a protein myoglobin; red meat animals like cows tend to have higher concentrations of myoglobin. These are animals that generally have a low of slow-twitch muscle because they utilize muscles for a long period of time but without any rapid bursts White meat animals like chicken have less myoglobin because they have fast-twitch muscles primarily. They tend to move and stand a lot less, and when they do, it's in quick bursts. Fat composition can also affect appearance of meat. You might have seen pictures of really expensive cuts of beef like wagyu or kobe, which are filled with white streaks everywhere, and might have a slightly more pink color. This is because they tend to have a higher fat content which is apparent in the meat. And diet, outside of providing fat and muscle sources, can be a big factor in the coloration of the meat. Wild salmon are pink because of their diet of shrimp and krill, which contributes Astaxanthin, a molecule which gives that pinkish color. In fact, farmed salmon, which may not be fed a shrimp/krill rich diet, generally have some variety of greyish-white color, and are colored pink to look more natural.


Question: Why and how are crows so intelligent?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why and how are crows so intelligent?

Crows are not "so intelligent", compared to people or whales. However, when compared to other birds they are much smarter than the average bird. Birds have a small brain (to save weight) and much of their brain is taken up with hardware control of their wings (because flying is hard to do). A bird that's evolved a smarter brain is unusual, and that makes crows unusual for birds.


Question: Why do some elderly people move their mouth a lot, as if they're chewing on something?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why do some elderly people move their mouth a lot, as if they're chewing on something?

The chewing motion is found almost exclusively in people who have lost teeth. On rare occasions, certains tranquilisers or antidepressants may cause a side effect called tardive dyskinesia, an inability to control what are ordinarily voluntary movements. These movements are as likely to involve the nose as the mouth or jaws, though. In most cases, the chewing motion is a neuromuscular response to the lack of teeth: an attempt by the oral cavity to achieve some from equilibrium. In particular, sufferers can't position their upper and lower jaws properly. With a full set of ivories, the teeth act as a stop to keep the jaws in place.


Question: How do investors/traders profit from short selling? Ie. profit from the drop of value in public companies' share price.

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 How do investors/traders profit from short selling? Ie. profit from the drop of value in public companies' share price.

Someone short-selling with a brokerage usually shortcuts the process, but the basic transaction is this: The short seller borrows a share of stock, promising to return a share of stock at a later date. They then sell it. Eventually, they will have to re-acquire a share of the same stock and return it to the original owner, but if the price drops in the interim, they make money on the difference between the price they sold it for and the price they have to buy it back for.


Question: Why don’t plants get dusty?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why don’t plants get dusty?

I’m pretty sure that even real indoor plants do accumulate some dust; at least mine do - although they don’t accumulate it as much as other surfaces. The plastic or fabric leaves on fake plants may have a surface that attracts or retains dust, due to stickiness or static electricity. Also, real plants do move slightly on their own, to follow the sun - either daily or seasonally. This slight movement might be enough to reduce the amount of dust that accumulates.


Question: What is the anti-trust paradox?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 What is the anti-trust paradox?

Once upon a time local retail stores dotted your town. You went to an electronics store for TV's, the grocery store for food, and the general store for toilet paper. Each individual store has it's own physical store, management, and supply chain adding overhead and cost to the customer. Then Wal-Mart happens. They buy one big building and stock it with food, toilet paper and electronics. In a single trip you can get buffalo wings, beer, a 60" flat screen, shit paper AND the toilet for the ultimate SuperBowl Thunderbox. Because they're so big, they can negotiate lower prices with their manufacturers. Because their stores carry such variety, they can fill a single truck with that day's goods from their warehouses instead of partially unloading 6 different trucks from 6 different suppliers. This cuts labor and overhead expense. That means you can buy the exact same things at Wal-Mart a drastically lower price than you could from the local guys. Cheaper goods is good for society right? The problem is that their business model only works BECAUSE they're big. If you want to compete with them for the lowest price on shit paper, you would have to build an equivalent amount of warehouses and retail stores with a world-class logistics chain before you even make your first sale. It's such a large up-front investment that it would be virtually impossible to start a proper rival. Since the other guys can't compete, Wal-Mart puts them out of business. Now Walmart can double their prices on toilet paper, knowing there's no way someone could beat them in a proper competition. That's a monopoly, and that's bad. Benevolent monopolies are good, but they are also a fantasy. If someone owns 100% of a space, they're going to maximize their profits. Competition by definition breeds inefficiencies, but it also serves as a check against both businesses. They each have to provide an equivalent level of service for an equivalent level of price to keep justifying their value to the consumer. If left un-checked, monopolies like Amazon, Disney, or AT & T can make it impossible to compete against them making it possible to profit from hurting society.


Question: how was asbestos created, why is it dangerous?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 how was asbestos created, why is it dangerous?

Asbestos is a natural material, it is mined from the earth. It is dangerous because when it breaks, it realeases extreamly fine fibres that get stuck in your lungs and your body can't remove them. When too much builds up in your lungs, it causes all kinds of trouble, most commun being mesothelioma, which is a type of cancer.


Question: If you are you because you got half your DNA from each of your parents, why are older/younger siblings not physical carbon copies of each other?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 If you are you because you got half your DNA from each of your parents, why are older/younger siblings not physical carbon copies of each other?

The half I get from one parent (say my mother), is not equal to the half my siblings got from my mother. Say my mother has {a,b,c,d} I could have gotten {a,b} from her, while my sister got {a,c}, and my brother got {b,d}. similarly for genes from my father, and you get completely different genomes for all of us.


Question: Why do US politicians consider Russia such a huge threat?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why do US politicians consider Russia such a huge threat?

For decades, the Russian-led Soviet Union was a huge threat to the US and the Western World. This belief is still strong. Since Russia recovered from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia is actively working against the US-led World Order. The US and its allies believe in a unipolar world. The US as the strongest nation to lead the others and make everybody adopt representative liberal democracy, capitalism and free markets. For this, the US created and supported several international organisations like the UN, the IMF, etc. Russia believes in a multi-polar world with several equal leaders. So they don't want the US to meddle in what Russia considers *her* corner of the world. Russia has little regard for Western rules like territorial integrity and has often acted militarily against its neighbours like Georgia or Ukraine. This is the general animosity between them. Now for some current issues: Some of Russia's neighbours are US allies (for example Estonia and Latvia), US politicians are concerned that Russia might act against them. This would either result in War with Russia, or the US abandoning its Allies which would seriously harm US influence in the World. Also, Russia and the US have mutually exclusive aims in the Syrian Civil War. The US wants to remove Assad, Russia wants to keep him in power. The US accuses Russia of specifically bombing non-Islamist rebels and civilians, thus committing war crimes. Lastly, there are current allegations and indications that Russia might have interfered in the last Presidential Election of the USA and might do the same in other Western elections. There is also the whole mess of the ties to Russia of President Trump and members of his administration. Some US politicians are scared that Russia might have blackmailing material against President Trump, or even that he might be conspiring with them. TL;DR: Russia is the main country defying the US right now and is alleged to have meddled in their elections. Edit: Guys, please don't downvote other comments because you disagree with them. /u/aescolanus wrote a clear comment without any personal attacks, or other reasons to downvote him. He didn't break any subreddit rule. If you disagree with him, do so via comment. If you think he states something wrong, ask for sources and/or disagree. Disagreement on political topics without hate or personal attacks is rare enough on Reddit. Don't downvote it into oblivion! So please remove your downvotes for his comment, and leave him an upvote for a well-written, thematically relevant comment.


Question: Why is the national debt in Japan so high?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why is the national debt in Japan so high?

The Japanese have been fighting a deflation-driven recession since the early 90s. What that means is that people spend less money, the economy shrinks, and people get laid off. This makes people fearful, so they spend even less money, and the economy shrinks more, and more people get laid off. It's a viscous circle. We know the best way to break out of that circle is for the government to step in and jump start the economy by: (1) spending lots and lots of money, and (2) loaning money out to anyone who wants it. The government keeps spending and spending until the economy gets health again. This takes some will power, because there's a strong temptation to take the foot off the gas too early. The problem is that the Japanese keep doing it wrong. They spend some money, not enough to jump start the economy. So they end up with the worst possible outcome - huge debts and an economy that won't get better. And then they try it again and fail for the same reason. And then again, and again, and again. To add to this, Japan has very stable debt as A. most of it is domestically owned by Japanese citizens and B. Japan, like the U.S has a good credit rating


Question: what is currency depreciation? Why does china do it and why will it help them undermine tariffs?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 what is currency depreciation? Why does china do it and why will it help them undermine tariffs?

I'll try to answer this as best as I can. If anyone spots a mistake here and there, feel free to correct me! *deep breath* So here goes. There is a difference between currency depreciation and currency undervaluation. **Currency Depreciation** refers to the lowering of the price of a currency relative to another, through natural market variations (Example: More tourists from China wants to go to the US, and therefore need to buy USD. The value of USD goes up, and China's RMB goes down). **Currency Undervaluation** refers to the artificial act of either 1. purposefully controlling the exchange rate to be at a cheap/low rate through Federal Reserves, or 2. the natural demand for the currency is at a lower level than what it should be, for whatever reason. I believe your question refers to currency undervaluation, as you mention the US trade deficit and China's position towards tariffs. In China's case, for the past 50 or so years, the RMB has been at a semi-fixed rate relative to the USD. This stems from the fact that China was a developing country during its initial "opening up". The artificially maintained low exchange rate was internationally approved as part of the policies that encourage developing economies to grow. The low currency value makes the goods that China makes cheaper relative to the US, encouraging demand in both US and China for Chinese goods. This allows the economy to develop and "boost" trade output. In the current era, China is arguably no longer a developing economy; their manufacturing scale surpasses the US, and we have been seeing them shift away from a manufacturing-based economy to a more tertiary (finance, IT, services) sector economy. However, this does not mean that China is producing less manufactured goods. The low price of Chinese goods has instead meant that the US cannot compete with China in terms of of sheer output and manufacturing cost+efficiency. Therefore, China has been accused of exploiting their low currency value to "dump" goods and making sure that their gross output in terms of trade has somewhere to go (the US market), when they are in fact no longer considered a developing economy. Tariffs, which are additional costs for manufacturers/importers, will ensure that Chinese goods will become more expensive in the US. This increased price of Chinese goods will theoretically "offset" the low-value of the RMB, bringing the total price of a good back in line with what the US believes it is worth. The administration hopes that this will help US manufacturing regain their competitiveness, as the total price of Chinese goods will now be higher, or at least similar to, the price of US goods. Snap forward to 2018, we now see that China is actually trying to increase their currency value (Currency Valuation) in order to encourage the RMB to become an internationally supported and traded currency. However, the trade war with the US has put that temporarily on hold, as increasing the RMB's value right now would mean that Chinese goods are EVEN MORE expensive after the tariffs, which would be a major blow to China's manufacturing industry. The US has been calling for China to raise their RMB value for a long time, as that can better reflect the true value of Chinese products. Unfortunately, even if the Chinese government is willing, the current administration's tariffs mean that they cannot raise the RMB as that would destabilise their own economy too much.


Question: What are left/right political views?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 What are left/right political views?

It started in the French Revolution in the late 1700s. During meetings, anti-monarchists sat on the left side of a room and monarchists sat on the right. That turned into a metaphor for all sorts of different viewpoints, not always consistently. Usually right-wing is associated with establishment, military, religion, inherited wealth, and conservatism, and left-wing with radicalism, diplomacy, secularism, working-class, and progressivism, but not always.


Question: What technological advancements have occured for the 5G mobile network to be so much faster than it's predecessor?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 What technological advancements have occured for the 5G mobile network to be so much faster than it's predecessor?

I used to be a patent lawyer for some of the companies doing this work (Ericsson, Qualcomm, etc.) so I feel pretty comfortable answering this. In my opinion, there haven’t been any truly groundbreaking technologies in this field that have allowed for 5G. Rather, 5G is a mix of a number of now relatively standard technologies that work in sync with one another. To understand why things are working out this way, you should realize that the number of devices that use wireless signals have increased exponentially, and that different types of devices work better in different configurations (i.e., different frequencies, different distances, different battery lengths, different amounts of data to transmit, etc.). While this all might seem relatively obvious, it is the big motivating factor for 5G. For example, if autonomous vehicles are going to work at a large scale, then there needs to be a network capable of handling their needs. These needs include large data transmission, high reliability, high speed, and high continuity. To meet these needs, an eNodeB (i.e., a radio tower) can transmit a high frequency signal to the vehicle because more information can be included in a higher frequency signal. However, high frequency signals tend to be disrupted by their surrounding environment more easily than lower frequency signals. For example, millimeter wave signals (i.e., high frequency signals) can be blocked by trees, human bodies, some buildings, etc. To counteract this type of path interference, you need to have more antennas over the same area. So instead of having an eNodeB every .5 km^2, you might place them every .1 km^2 (by the way, this is where the term "cell" in cell phone comes from, because each of these areas are considered a "cell"). While all of the above might cover the autonomous vehicle use case, we have also seen a major boost in internet of things (IoT) devices, like small sensors that are remotely located, not hooked up to a connected power source, and do not need to transmit a lot of data. For example, there are sensors that are attached to various portions of a bridge that transmit vibration signals, amongst others, back to a central server to monitor the structural integrity and wear on that bridge. Since these devices only need to transmit a small amount of information every so often, they can be set up to send very intermittent signals at a low data rate to conserve energy and battery power. Since they are usually remotely located, they also may be better set for low frequency signals, as those types of signals don't experience the same path interference that higher frequency signals usually do. Therefore, you might want to send lower frequency signals at a lower rate to these devices, but they might occur at a much larger volume because there are more IoT devices than there are self-driving cars. Your standard smart phone falls in the middle of these two use cases, but it is slowly creeping toward requiring more and more data with more and more reliability. So what does 5G do to accommodate all of these needs? Well, they do a bunch of things, almost none of which are super groundbreaking. One thing they do is use antenna arrays. Antenna arrays are devices that include a bunch of antennas, and different antennas in each array can be configured to emit a signal of a different frequency. The antennas in each array can also be configured to change the direction and/or intensity of its beam so that it can avoid potential interference along a path. 5G also uses something called MIMO (multi-in, multi-out) to increase bandwidth and/or reliability. This technology has been known for a while now (you see it in multi antenna wifi routers for example), but they are now applying it at a larger scale and across multiple users (referred to as MU-MIMO (multi-user MIMO). 5G technologies also include using machine learning technologies to understand user preferences so as to predict behavior of a user and needs of a device. Many 5G technologies also include energy harvesting (e.g., solar power) technologies so as to increase operation time for IoT devices, for example. These technologies also use various forms of coding, such as trellis modulation, turbo coding, and a number of other mathematical techniques to increase data transmission and/or reliability. In summary, 5G is really just adding a bunch of existing technologies together in a relatively new and complicated manner. If you get involved with this field, you find out pretty quickly that most of the researchers and engineers are throwing different combinations at the wall to see what sticks (i.e., what the 3GPP adopts to their standard). I really just grazed the surface here, so if you have any follow up questions I'd be happy to answer. **TL;DR:** There aren't many new technologies. 5G is just adding existing tech together in a complicated manner. **Edit**: I initially only posted the first paragraph, but I added the other four to provide some more detail.


Question: How come you can have a good or bad sleep?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 How come you can have a good or bad sleep?

Simplest answer: variance. Better answer: there are multiple factors involved. Light sources in the room or before you go to bed mess with melatonin production, which signals your body to sleep. If you wake up in certain parts of your REM cycle, you'll feel groggy instead of rested. Nightmares can make you tense during sleep, which makes some people less rested. Alcohol interferes with sleep quality. And I've heard that sleep you get before midnight is twice as restful as sleep you get after midnight. The effects of stimulants shouldn't be underestimated. The half-life of caffeine is about 6 hours. This means that if you have a cup of coffee at 2 or 3 in the afternoon and go to bed at 8 or 9, half the caffeine from your afternoon coffee is still in your system, interfering with your sleep. And the list goes on...


Question: Why is it important to remove the bullet when someone’s been shot?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why is it important to remove the bullet when someone’s been shot?

That’s a movie thing. Removing the bullet may eventually be important if it has perforated and become lodged in an important organ or near a joint, but it’s not immediately necessary and may even cause further harm. It’s not uncommon for bullets/fragments to be left alone rather than removed, it can be more trouble to extract them than it’s worth. First aid is to apply pressure to stop the bleeding, not cause more damage fishing around in a gunshot wound.


Question: The hottest temperature ever recorded was 5.5 trillion °C. How did scientists manage to measure it?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 The hottest temperature ever recorded was 5.5 trillion °C. How did scientists manage to measure it?

There is a correlation between temperature and intensity of light. Astrophysicists use the Hertzsprung-Russel diagram ( URL_0 ). Temperatures that high are measured using this correlation. It's also important to understand that those measurements come with a margin of error usually proportional to the scale. So it's more likely that the temperature was 5.5 trillion °C, give or take a few billion. Edit: I am not an expert. Kindly refer to mfb-'s top level comment for another explanation.


Question: How did astrophysicists determine the planets we already know about?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 How did astrophysicists determine the planets we already know about?

Back before electric lights, there wasn't much to do at night except look at the lights in the sky. People who looked at the stars noticed, thousands of years ago, that while most stars stay in the same place relative to each other (Orion's belt and the big dipper are there to see every night, always the same) a few of the lights wandered around around. Apparently the word planet comes from the Greek for "wanderer." Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are bright enough to see easily without a telescope, and people just watched them night after night, having nothing better to do, and saw them wander around among the "fixed" stars. It took a while for a clever mathematician to make sense of the wandering, but Kepler and his colleagues figured out that the wanderers were moving in almost-circles (ellipses) around the Sun.


Question: Would scientists be able to predict if an asteroid is going to hit Earth?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 Would scientists be able to predict if an asteroid is going to hit Earth?

It's in a range. We are fairly confident that we know of most world-ending sized asteroids in the solar system, but there's still a lot of damage that can be done from asteroids smaller than that, and we don't know all of those are. It could happen "at any minute" but is still incredibly unlikely. There's plenty of other threats that we should worry about way more.


Question: The sun's rays shouldn't lose energy whilst they are travelling in space (as vacuum), but still, planets get colder and colder away from the sun. Is it related to the number of photons reaching a planet?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 The sun's rays shouldn't lose energy whilst they are travelling in space (as vacuum), but still, planets get colder and colder away from the sun. Is it related to the number of photons reaching a planet?

Pretty much yeah. If you imagine the surface area of a sphere around the sun. As the radius of the sphere gets bigger, so the planets are further away, the total power from the sun will be spread over a much larger area, meaning that the intensity (power supplied to each unit area) will decrease following an inverse square law (as distance doubles intensity is divided by 4).


Question: Why is Apple suing Qualcomm?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why is Apple suing Qualcomm?

Qualcomm developed a lot of the technologies behind LTE, and have patents on them. When a company's technology gets incorporated into a standard like LTE, they have to promise to let other people use those patents under "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" terms (which makes sense, but isn't exactly well defined). Apple is claiming that the terms Qualcomm wants aren't fair- they're charging too much and making them pay extra for patents they don't want in order to get the ones that they need in order to make phones with LTE. They're also claiming this as an anti-trust issue: Qualcomm makes their own processors (if you're in the US, pretty much any flagship phone other than the iPhone uses Qualcomm chipsets), so Apple is claiming that they're doing this in order to make it more expensive to use their competitors.


Question: Why is Australia so overwhelmingly dry when nearby places like Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Indonesia, and Tasmania are all so wet and lush?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why is Australia so overwhelmingly dry when nearby places like Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Indonesia, and Tasmania are all so wet and lush?

There's a variety of factors Australia's geographical position has a lot to do with it. Australia is south of the high-moisture tropical belt that Indonesia and New Guinea are in. It sits under the subtropical high-pressure belt, which prevents the lifting of air required for rain. Another factor is sheer size. The coastal areas of Australia actually get a lot of rain, but this drains the moisture out of the air so there isn't any left to get to core of the continent. Where-as New Zealand is much narrower so the clouds get a chance to rain on the whole sub-continent. The other part of this is mountains, or the lack there of. Australia doesn't have any significant mountain ranges so there is no geography to force moisture laden air upwards to seed mountains and glaciers with snow. This prevents river systems from forming like we get in North+South America. The Amazon in the South and Prairies in the North only exist because of the climate caused by the mountain ranges to their West.


Question: How are we not wasting oxygen when we breathe out carbon dioxide?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 How are we not wasting oxygen when we breathe out carbon dioxide?

We take in oxygen because when it chemically joins with something, it releases energy. We then use that energy to live. Once it has done that, when it has joined with carbon to make carbon dioxide, its job is done, The energy available has been released. You see, it isn't the oxygen we need. It is the chemical energy available in having oxygen and carbon/hydrogen as separate things - the carbon/hydrogen loosely bound into carbohydrates like sugar. It is a bit like how a hydro-electric plant doesn't 'waste water' when the water that flows out of the tail race at the bottom of the dam. The plant didn't want water - it wanted the energy in that water being up there at the top. Now the generator has been spun, the energy caught from allowing the water to fall to the bottom, the job is done and the low energy water released.


Question: How is a multilevel marketing scheme not illegal/not considered a pyramid scheme?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 How is a multilevel marketing scheme not illegal/not considered a pyramid scheme?

> How is a multilevel marketing scheme not illegal/not considered a pyramid scheme? The distinction is that in MLM there is a real product being sold (in theory) and it can bring in profits legitimately. There is no fraud or misrepresentation of what is happening, it is just typically a really shitty deal.


Question: Why are there more visible air bubbles in tap water when it is cold outside?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 Why are there more visible air bubbles in tap water when it is cold outside?

Gasses are more soluble in a liquid like water when it is really cold, and its solubility goes down as temperature increases. In hot water, a lot of those dissolved gas bubbles have left the water, whereas in cold water, the gas bubbles stay dissolved in the water easily. Thats why you see more bubbles in cold water than in hot water.


Question: Is there a maximum limit of how hot something can get before it just stops getting hotter?

The user asks a question, and the Assistant answers it. The assistant provides the user with the answer that strictly follows the following guidelines. The answer should be enclosed within <answer> </answer> tags, respectively, i.e., <answer> ANSWER HERE </answer>.
Your answer should follow these rubric criterias:
Factual Accuracy: The answer must be factually correct and does not contradict the reference answer.
Relevance and Completeness: The answer should directly address the specific question, covering all essential aspects.
Clarity and Organization: The answer should be well-structured, coherent, and easy to follow.
Depth and Insight: The answer should provide thoughtful analysis or context, going beyond superficial details.
Conciseness: The answer should avoid unnecessary repetition and be as clear and succinct as possible.

Response Format rules:
- Always start your response with <answer> tag and end with </answer>.
- Do not include any text or commentary before the opening <answer> tag and after the closing </answer> tag.
For example, your response follow this format:
<answer>
[Your final detailed answer goes here]
</answer>
 Is there a maximum limit of how hot something can get before it just stops getting hotter?

-0 K. No, that's not a typo. So every answer that you've gotten here concerning the Planck Temperature or the motion of atoms is, bluntly, dead wrong. This is because temperature **does not** correlate directly with motion; that approximation only works on the lower end of the temperature scale, and is a result of the way in which we typically measure temperature. Bear with me cause this gets **weird**, but is the correct answer (inb4 muh 5 year olds). The *actual* way in which temperature is defined is through the interrelationship between a piece of matters' entropy (a measure of how "disordered" or "useless" it is, for lack of a better word), and its energy (which would include its motion). Don't worry about precisely what entropy is (that is honestly and ELI5 in-and-of-itself, and involves one of the more sorcerous scientific fields that confuses the hell out of everyone who studies it), just take it on faith that it's just a measurable thermodynamic quantity. If you're familiar with calculus, the actual definition is; T=dU/dS ~ ΔU/ΔS where U and S are the energy and entropy, respectively, and ΔU and ΔS are the *changes* in those quantities as you increase the temperature (or, more accurately, temperature is caused by how those two changes occur alongside one another). Starting at the low end of the temperature scale, as you increase an objects temperature, you gradually increase its entropy *and* its energy, but the entropy increase actually starts to diminish as you get to higher and higher temperatures. This is why temperature increases, mathematically; for constant steps of dU, the dS gets smaller, and so you're dividing a given number (say, 1) by another number that's getting smaller and smaller with each step you take. Thus, there is a given state where you add some finite amount of energy, and the entropy change is near zero. At this point, you're approaching a temperature of infinite, as the dU is basically not changing, while the dS is getting smaller and smaller, approaching zero. [Now lets get weird]( URL_0 ); give it more energy, and the entropy will **decrease**. Thus, you'll have the same dU, divided by a *negative* and very small dS, giving you a temperature approaching *negative infinite K*. Give it even more energy, and the dS term (while still negative) continues to get smaller and smaller in magnitude; thus, as you heat the object more and more, the temperature decreases in magnitude. Eventually, you reach a state where the entropy decrease becomes arbitrarily large, thus you get a finite dU divided by a really big dS, which will approach -0. As a result, the hottest possible temperature is -0 K, and the ordering from coldest to hottest is as follows; 0 K < 300 K < ∞ K < -∞ K < -300 K < -0 K This has shown up in both advanced thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, and has also been [experimentally verified.]( URL_1 ) It's important to note that this is a screwy scale that makes a lot of the math we use fall apart, but this is largely due to the fact that our entire concept of temperature, and how we measure it, is actually hilariously complicated and flawed (although still very useful, because you don't see those negative temperatures in your day-to-day existence).