Question: How does a microscope not show the microbes on its own lens?

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 How does a microscope not show the microbes on its own lens?

A microscope is essentially a series of lenses. You know all those knobs on the side of one? They adjust the distance between the lenses and/or the distance between the slide and the lens apparatus. The reason they do that is because lenses have *focal points,* which are points outside the lens at which light projected through the lens will converge--or, in more familiar terms, a point that the image is the most crisp and clear. When an object is moved into the focal point of the lens apparatus, it becomes magnified. Outside of this point, it's blurred. If it's too far outside, it's blurred so badly that you can't even see it. Microbes on the lens are too close to the lens to be anything but horribly blurred, to the point where you can't see them except maybe as a slight tint to the light. Microbes on the slide, you could probably see if you focus on them.


Question: How did Times New Roman become the 'standard' font for typing?

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 How did Times New Roman become the 'standard' font for typing?

There was a time when changing a font wasn't as simple as Ctrl-A right click. It meant changing mechanical parts and retyping the whole document again. So when you picked a font, you pretty much stuck with it. Times New Roman was commissioned by a British newspaper (*The Times*, naturally), who wanted a serif font (often called a Roman font), and the result was quite popular. It gained further popularity when Microsoft decided to make it the default font in early versions of their word processing software.


Question: Why do things feel different when one of my family members isn’t home, even if I don’t know their gone, something just feels different, why?

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 Why do things feel different when one of my family members isn’t home, even if I don’t know their gone, something just feels different, why?

Subconsciously you're keeping track of them in the back of your mind when they're around. You can hear the floors creak, toilets flush, windows open, microwave run, cough, sneeze, ringtone, etc etc when they're home. Your subconscious notices when those things stop, and it triggers that alone feeling to show up. It's the same thing parents feel. When the kids are being too quiet, your subconscious alerts you that something is awry, and you get a sudden urge to go check on them, despite not actively thinking about them.


Question: Why baby boomers are often blamed for messing up the economy?

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 Why baby boomers are often blamed for messing up the economy?

Housing policy and social security. Basically boomers lived at a time when a lot of laws were passed that increased the value of their homes and ensured they would have healthcare and pensions when they retired, and young people are left unable to afford houses and footing the bill of their parents’ pensions and healthcare


Question: What determines a stock's price at any given time?

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 What determines a stock's price at any given time?

The price you see is generally the price of the last sale. How was that price determined? By the open limit orders There are orders that sit on the market waiting to be filled. Limit orders buy or sell a certain amount of stock at a set price or better. If the stock is trading at $100 then there are some open buy orders at $99 and some open sell orders at $101 that won't be filled until all the orders at $100 have been paired up. If you try to buy more shares than are currently available for $100 then you'll drive the price up until enough people are willing to sell to you at the new price.


Question: How does a foreign government (non-US) values or devalues it's own currency against the US Dollar?

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 How does a foreign government (non-US) values or devalues it's own currency against the US Dollar?

China and France are different cases. China uses a fixed exchange, Since its a major economic power and a controlled economy it can set by law "my currency is worth this many dollars" and enforce it. Some countries which are weaker economies like Argentina have set that, they set the price of their currency and peg it to the dollar, but it causes major economic turmoil since they dont have the market power or industrial capacity to mantain it so the product prices go crazy... Anyways. In the case of france you have many tools, - Interest rates : money is debt, its that simple. its a piece of paper that says "the goverment of X country owes you 5 dollars/euros/yuan whatever", as any debt interest is paid on it. thats the interest rate on a currency, the more interest you pay, the more people want your currency, but a a high interest rate damages internal loans and finance. - Currency volume. The more currency out there, the less its worth, so by changing the volume of currency out there, destoying or printing more notes, you can manipulate the price of the currency.


Question: What is really in the online terms and conditions?

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 What is really in the online terms and conditions?

Ideally, Terms and Conditions should describe the product or service, describe how it is meant to be used, how it is not meant to be used, what steps a provider can take to discriminate against misuse, what sort of accountability the user has in regards to what they do with the product or service, what sort of accountability the provider has for what you do with the service, instructions of cancelling the contract, and a detailed description of fees or payment services. It can all be boiled down into simple and readable sentences, but in order for it to be legally binding, it has to be incredibly specific. This is because ambiguity in a contract favors the person who did not draft the contract.


Question: how does an object in space, like a satellite, stay on a smooth orbit trajectory?

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 how does an object in space, like a satellite, stay on a smooth orbit trajectory?

If you're asking how an orbit works, [this]( URL_0 ) is a great way of visualizing what is happening. Essentially, an orbit is when something is going fast enough to miss hitting the ground because the ground curves away from it. Generally, the way orbits are portrayed (i.e. a smooth oval) is a very accurate approximation. In reality, there are perturbations from other bodies (i.e. a satellite in orbit around Earth would have be pulled on by the Moon) or uneven gravity fields from imperfectly shaped planets (the Earth has this, and it changes satellite orbits over time). Of course, for actual mission planning, these need to be accounted for, but ellipses are actually very accurate in most cases.


Question: why the storms of Jupiter separate gases into striking vortices and bands of heterogenous color, rather than mixing them into a continuous gradient?

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 why the storms of Jupiter separate gases into striking vortices and bands of heterogenous color, rather than mixing them into a continuous gradient?

First, there is the phenomenon of Hadley cells. These come about because the planet is round, spinning, and has one side facing the sun. These are pretty stable systems where the wind predominantly flows in a given direction. On Earth, these are responsible for Trade winds (winds strongly blowing west when a little north of the equator, then switch to blowing strongly east above \~30° latitude). On Jupiter, there are a lot more of these cells, each cell is one of the colored bands. The vorticies that you see are the interactions of these two circulation cells. The colors of the clouds come from two chemicals, Ammonia clouds (white) and ammonium hydrosulfide (brown) On Jupiter, like on Earth, the atmosphere cools at higher altitudes. In the regions of the atmosphere where the air is rising, it reaches an elevation where it is cool enough that the ammonia condenses into clouds. These clouds are heavier than the air around them, but they are held up (and replinished) by the updrafts. In the regions where the air is falling, there is no ammonia to form clouds, and any ammonia clouds that are formed get pushed down to where it is warmer, so they evaporate. As a result, you can see the atmosphere below the ammonia cloud layer, which has a brownish color. As a side note, Jupiter is big. Those tiny vorticies that you see would be continent-spanning hurricanes if they were on Earth.


Question: Why does buying things in bulk cost less per product compared to individual items?

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 Why does buying things in bulk cost less per product compared to individual items?

There's a few reasons, but one of the biggest is the individual units apply to the "impulse buyer". Chewing gum or chocolate bars at a checkout are a perfect example - people see it, think "I want one of those", and will pay a premium for it without worrying about an extra quarter or two. They don't impulse-buy 20 at a time though - that's more of a stategic decision where price is usually factored into the buying decision... so you have to sell the collection at a lower per-unit cost or people just won't buy it. Add to this that a lot of customers simply do not impulse-buy. They want those chocolate bars, but they are not going to pay luxury prices for them, and this goes doubly so for a family that uses a lot of consumables. So to get those customers to buy you give them a 'mass deal' on larger quantities, and this gets their business when otherwise you'd lose it. Economics of business also plays a part, and this applies both to the store where you're buying stuff and the businesses that sell stock to that store. There's immediate-revenue from a big bulk sale (both supplier-to-store, and store-to-customer), and there's longer-term profit from a bunch of individual small purchases that each have a higher mark-up. Most businesses need both, and have to cater to both types of customer, but can only get the second type of customer if the bulk buy is cheaper per-unit than the individual buy. Finally, the cost of dealing with the individual product is a LOT higher. Packing a truck with individual small cartons, handling those, stocking them in different areas in the store, making their displays continue to look nice, ringing them through, and so on and so on... it all takes time and money to do. So selling a bunch of different individual units is usually more expensive than selling bulk quantities that you can bring in by the pallet-load and handle all the same... and so the cost goes up.


Question: how do we estimate the number of people in crowds?

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 how do we estimate the number of people in crowds?

A very simple way in which you can do this yourself is visually, from pictures. You look for elements for which you know the area, for instance delimited square sections of available standing space. You estimate how much of it is occupied purely visually with people, and then you estimate the density of people per square meter. The last one is trickier because people can be standing with varying spacing between one another, but you can approximate visually if you have a zoomed in image. It's also possible to go for an "upper approximate" by assuming people are as packed together as possible, and then knowing that the number you got is the maximum possible number and the real number is lower than that. If you decompose the entire crowd into enough subsections of known area, and have available "density" estimates for each one, then with purely visual methods you can estimate the number of people within an error range of +- 10% easily. Mathematically, for each subsection you have nr_of_people = occupied_area(in m^2 ) * people_per_m^2 . Sum up all the subsections of the image that you used, and you get the total estimate. It's a little time consuming, but simple.


Question: Why does water make smelly things more smelly?

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 Why does water make smelly things more smelly?

Adding water to, e.g., dog hair causes any water-soluble material to dissolve. Some of this material is smelly in large enough quantities, but usually is spread out across the dog's hair and skin. At most human-friendly temperatures, the smelly compounds will enter the air via evaporation and from being volatile chemicals. When aerosolized, the smelly compounds are much more concentrated than on dog hair, making them smell much worse.


Question: Why are old photos warmer in color than more modern photos?

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 Why are old photos warmer in color than more modern photos?

The color temperature of a photo is determined by the white balance. Nowadays, with digital cameras, this white balance can be adjusted on-the-fly in software. A warm, yellow color room with incandescent light bulbs can be adjusted to have a cool, blue temperature. Most photos and print are set to a color temperature resembling daylight which skews quite cool/blue. This temperature shows well on our digital screens that produce a lot of blue. For old film photos, the physical film has a set white balance based on the chemicals in the film. Depending on manufacturer, this can skew towards warm or cool. Old photos often appear warmer because the physical photos lose their blue pigments first with time and exposure. Everything becomes yellower so we associate old photos with that tone.


Question: how does supply driven economics work?

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 how does supply driven economics work?

I've interpreted the question primarily in the context of macroeconomics. No non-hack economists have used terms like supply-side economics and demand-side economics since the 1980s. Anyone who has got past undergraduate economics and expressed any interest in graduate school will have got to both aggregate demand and supply. In 2019, these terms are political ones that have basically no relation to the actual practice of economics. Returning to the question. Generally, what is considered to be supply-side economics, isn't actually supply-side economics. The main explanation for this concept goes something along the lines of "if we reduce taxes, people can spend more and buy more things". This is fundamentally a demand-side story. What the terms originally meant in the 1980s was a broad label between "Old" Keynesian (then not old) demand-management economics and a more broad non-novel belief that lower taxes and looser regulations would lower costs on firms and allow them to expand production. This is not an unreasonable idea. If it is expensive and difficult for firms to expand, they will do less of that. Making it easier and cheaper for them to do so has the same incentive effect as making Netflix cheaper will have on Netflix subscriptions. If it is expensive for firms to raise equity, they will do less of that, lowering their ability to invest in machines and other products. In the late 1970s, there was also something now called "stagflation", which was a generally stagnant economy accompanied with high inflation. In such an environment, increasing demand would likely cause higher inflation rather than any economic growth. And in that environment, such policies are eminently growth-increasing, and in the added context of higher interest rates intended to avert inflation, one of the few mechanisms by which government can avert recessionary tendencies. Politically, this idea has been massively overblown, even in the 1980s. You can find a general and relatively contemporaneous overview of the politicisation and general unreality of "supply-side economics" in the public imagination sold to them written by Martin Feldstein, _Supply Side Economics: Old Truths and New Claims_, 76 American Economic Review, 26 (1986). What Feldstein calls the "new supply-siders" massively overpromised and, in his opinion, discredited many of the more reasonable economists who made legitimate arguments with modest and reasonable predictions.


Question: Why does metal get cold when plastic does not?

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 Why does metal get cold when plastic does not?

Metal is a good thermal conductor and plastic isn’t. It’s the same reason why metal gets so hot in the summer. A good thermal conductor means that they transfer heat to colder objects and also absorb heat from warmer objects. That’s why they lose so much heat in the winter. It is, in fact, a better thermal conductor than air is.


Question: Why is population decline bad?

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 Why is population decline bad?

Economically speaking it is bad environmentally speaking it is good. Population expansion grows the economy, more people more goods and services need to be created to fulfill the needs of the expanded population, additionally expanding population means there are enough people to look after the elderly population in terms of carers and taxes. There is something called the lump of labor fallacy where people talk about others coming over and taking their jobs as if there is a finite amount of jobs in the economy which is false. URL_0


Question: What causes certain animals to have on average, longer or shorter life spans?

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</answer>
 What causes certain animals to have on average, longer or shorter life spans?

There are evolutionary advantages and disadvantages to having a long life span. If your food source is stable, and you have few or no predators, evolution tends to select for a long life span. This gives many opportunities to reproduce and thus pass on your genes. Consider if food sources are unstable and or predators are likely to kill the species at all phases of life. They need young that are able to grow quickly and reach reproduction age since it is only a matter of time before they are preyed upon. If food sources collapse then rebound, the survivors will need to reproduce quickly to form a more stable population as soon as they can. With their young quickly growing to become competitors for resources, staying alive longer starts to harm the survival rates of their offspring. Think if no human died, How soon would we run out of food? Who would win in a hostile competition over food, a full grown adult or a child? By eventually dying, more space is made available for the next generation. Shorter time between generations allow for evolution to occur more quickly too, so it is an advantage unto itself due to the increase adaptability it brings.


Question: What does "Buy the rumor sell the news" mean?

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 What does "Buy the rumor sell the news" mean?

In the world of speculative investment, stock prices often rally on hype well before any actual news releases. To make the best returns, you buy when the hype is building and sell before the news that everyone expects actually drops. Since everyone expected the news, when they finally get it there’s often lackluster price movement. This has been quite pronounced in the market this year - companies beat their earnings estimates and then the stock price tanks because overhyped “investors” were already assuming even greater blowout earnings.


Question: How does Social Security ACTUALLY work? (In the US)

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 How does Social Security ACTUALLY work? (In the US)

> However, the Social Security Trust Fund is one of the LARGEST holders of the US Debt (16% of total!) which I imagine means that that the government is BORROWING LOTS OF MONEY to pay for the month payments. Just the opposite. Social Security taxes put more into the program than is necessary. Congress uses this amount for general spending purposes, instead of letting it sit unused. For accounting purposes, we treat it like the U.S. government is taking out a loan from the Social Security Trust Fund. Eventually, Social Security will need that money to pay retirees, if the ratio of retirees to workers is too high. This is the point where Social Security "runs out of money"--unless Congress wants to cut benefits, general revenue will need to be used to pay back what was borrowed, and because there is already a budget deficit, it will have to be borrowed from *external* creditors (like citizens investing in bonds) instead. This would represent a large increase in debt held by the public. The average Social Security recipient receives more money than they paid in during their lifetime. This means that the current funding formula only works while the population is growing--today's population of workers is much larger than today's population of retirees. We can predict future population growth, which appears to be slowing, and get an idea of when this funding formula is no longer sustainable at all, whether Congress repays what it borrowed or not. At this point, Congress has to raise taxes, reduce benefits, or borrow more to cover the gap.


Question: Why does water make materials more abrasive?

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 Why does water make materials more abrasive?

Water is very sticky due to the polar nature of its molecule, so it tends to cling to itself and to other surfaces. In the case of sand it would permeate all the empty spaces and cause all the individual sand grains to stick together. Therefore more resistance and more friction is experienced when you attempt to push your hand through.


Question: No matter how fast I shake my hips back and forth, my penis always seems to waggle at the same frequency. Why?

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 No matter how fast I shake my hips back and forth, my penis always seems to waggle at the same frequency. Why?

Your ding dong has a [Natural Frequency]( URL_0 ). This frequency increases by the root of the stiffness and decreases by the root of the mass of your schlong. Since both these properties tend to go in the same directions, the effects basically cancel out, so its not like you can change the natural frequency of your gentleman's sausage's whenever you want, no matter how excited you are. To get your salami really going, your best bet is to shake it at its natural frequency. But be careful, it might hurt or even break when resonance is achieved. Hope this helps. Edit: As I write this edit, almost 8000 fellow trouser-snake thrashers have gotten something out this explanation. I stand proud and stiff at this achievement. Unfortunately there has been too much learning going on as the question was delisted. But I won't be discouraged as apparently a mysterious member manipulator saw fit to give gold for this. The world thanks you. I will use it to fund ongoing research into other important issues of public interest.


Question: Why are there so many different units for measuring radiation?

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 Why are there so many different units for measuring radiation?

If I want to describe a ball, I could use weight (newton), mass (gram), volume (cubic meters) or shape (meters). Which one I use depends on what I want to describe. So with radiation there are different aspects we may want to talk about. How much radiation is being produced (becquerel), how much radiation is in the environment (C/kg), how much radiation has been absorbed by an object (gray), or how much damage the radiation has caused (sievert) each have their own unit. If I say 60 Gy, then you automatically know I'm talking about radiation that was absorbed. BUT, because all of these units describe the same concept/object we can convert them into each other. With my sphere, I can convert shape (meters) into volume (cubic meters), and then use mass (gram) to calculate weight (newton). With radiation, if I know how much radiation was produced (becquerel) I can figure out how much was in the environment at a specific location (C/kg), then determine how much could have been absorbed (grey), and finally use that to calculate how much damage was done (sievert). And similarly going backwards, if needed. Now if you are an American, you are lucky enough to learn 2 units for each of these. It's the same logic as why feet and meters measure distance. America is currently transitioning into the SI units, so students are currently learning both sets. Eventually all the old practicing doctors will retire and the new ones will be willing to use SI, and then it won't be so confusing. Source: I am a radiation therapist.


Question: How does milk stay fresh and not go bad before being put on a store shelf?

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 How does milk stay fresh and not go bad before being put on a store shelf?

After milking the cows they process it and then chill it. it's shipped in refrigerated trucks. Milk is actually heated first as pasteurization is part of processing. pasteurization kills bacteria and microbes in the milk. It may be skimmed (removing fats for butter, cream, etc and to make the types of milk 2%,skim, etc), homogenized and fortified as well before bottling and shipping. while milk left out warm will eventually spoil it's not like it will instantaneously go bad if it's not chilled.


Question: What is the mean center of population?

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 What is the mean center of population?

It's the average location of all people in a given area. Imagine a square, with one person in each corner. The mean centre of population would be the centre of the square, since that is the average location of all these people. Now imagine all 4 of the people in the square are equally spread along one edge of the square, the mean centre would be the centre of that edge, not the centre of the square. If a square had 10 people in one corner, and 1 in each of the other corners, the mean centre of population would be much closer to the corner with most people in, because each one acts as a metaphorical weight, pulling the centre towards them. By using census data you can quite accurately place every single person in a country (that responds), each with a geographical coordinate. Using mathematics you can average all of these coordinates, giving you one location that is the average centre of all these people. How do you average their coordinates over an entire country? Well back to our square example, if you gave every person a grid coordinate from 0 to 1, with 0 being the far left and the bottom, and 1 being the top and far right, you can average their distance. So ... top left = 0,1 ... top right = 1,1 ... bottom left = 0,0 ... bottom right = 1,0 If there's one person in each corner, you add the coordinates up and divide by number of people: 0,1 + 1,1 + 0,0 + 1,0 = 2,2 2,2 ÷ 4 = 0.5,0.5 So our example of 1 person in each corner has a centre of 0.5,0.5 which we can plot to be the centre of the square. If the top right corner has 7 people and each other corner has 1 person, we can do the following sum: 0,1 + 0,0 + 1,0 + 1,1 + 1,1 + 1,1 + 1,1 + 1,1 + 1,1 + 1,1 = 8,8 8,8 ÷ 10 = 0.8,0.8 So the average centre of these people is at point 0.8,0.8 which is near the top right corner You can do the same sum, just with more complex coordinates, for the entire population of a country


Question: Why can’t there be a length smaller than the Planck length, or a period of time shorter than the Planck time?

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 Why can’t there be a length smaller than the Planck length, or a period of time shorter than the Planck time?

The Planck length is the scale at which classical ideas about gravity and space-time cease to be valid, and quantum effects dominate. This is the smallest measurement of length with any meaning\*. The Planck time is the time it would take a photon travelling at the speed of light to cross a distance equal to the Planck length. This is the smallest measurement of time that has any meaning\*. *(edit: any meaning within our current, experimentally-corroborated models of physics, that is. There’s always the possibility that we have got the whole thing wrong and none of it actually works the way we think it does. But as long as the experiments keep matching the predictions, we’ve got nothing else to go on.)


Question: How come you have to add stock little by little to risotto instead of putting it all in at the beginning like you would with rice?

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 How come you have to add stock little by little to risotto instead of putting it all in at the beginning like you would with rice?

[You don't]( URL_0 ). The idea is that by adding stock in small quantities, it helps the rice cook more evenly and extracts starch from the rice that gives the risotto its creamy texture. Both of those effects can be achieved in other ways, as seen in the link - cooking in a shallow pan will distribute the heat better than a pot so you don't end up with the rice at the bottom overcooking, and the starch is coming from the surface of the rice, not being extracted from within the grains.


Question: How can air be salty?

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 How can air be salty?

the main source is from sea spray, tiny droplets of water that get splashed into the air and carried away like dust particles on the wind. This is why the air near the shore tastes salty too. Even smells "salty". Once the salt spray is in the air, any evaporation of water in the droplet will still leave the salt, and it will eventually settle out and reenter water in the next fog or rain event, leading to corrosion of whatever surface the salt landed on.


Question: why different metals have different sound /bass when they're hitting together?

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 why different metals have different sound /bass when they're hitting together?

They have different densities. The vibrations that go through the different metals are affected by this, in the sense that some metals ring or project more. This is probably oversimplifying it, since my initial understanding of this stuff comes from explanations as to why instruments such as flutes might be made out of different metals, such as nickel alloys,silver, or gold (of varying karatage). In the case of flutes, silver and gold tend to sound warmer (less shrill) than the nickel alloy.


Question: How can gravity slow down time, if time isn’t something tangible you can touch?

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 How can gravity slow down time, if time isn’t something tangible you can touch?

A better way to look at it is to think of time as the rate at which clocks tick. The deeper you put a clock in a gravitational field, the slower it will appear to tick compared to a clock higher up. You might want to read up about [Einstein's light clock]( URL_0 ) to get an idea of how to make a clock out of something tangible.


Question: Sometimes when I close one eye at a time, I notice that each eye sees slightly different colors. Why does this happen and how does the brain resolve putting those two different images together?

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 Sometimes when I close one eye at a time, I notice that each eye sees slightly different colors. Why does this happen and how does the brain resolve putting those two different images together?

Aside from differences in the light that is entering each eye, it could have something to do with having a slightly different number of the types of cone cells in the retina of each eye. The cones come in 3 different types and they each pick up a different wavelength of light. If you have more of one type than another in one eye compared to the other eye, that could account for a slight difference in the tone or saturation of color that you are seeing. I have this too - one eye sees color as warmer than the other.


Question: What gives a metal tensile strength vs impact strength?

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 What gives a metal tensile strength vs impact strength?

The strength of a material is based largely on what happens to it at a molecular level when it receives a particular force, whether it be tension or compression (or other forms like torsion, but that's not as relevant right now). Basically, it comes down to how the particles of a material are bonded together. The most common distinction in solids is amorphous vs. crystalline - in an amorphous solid, the particles are more random, jumbled, and bonded pretty much to any other particle near enough to them; in a crystal, they are arranged with a specific pattern (for example, they might lie in flat, sheet-like layers of squares or form small pyramids at a microscopic level). Tensile strength - the ability to be pulled through tension and deform without breaking - causes a shift at the molecular level; basically, when you pull on a ductile material, some of the bonds break apart, the particles shift, and new bonds form before the particles actually break apart. Metals tend to be more ductile than brittle materials like ceramic, because their atoms form bonds very easily (the bonds are formed by sharing electrons, and metals tend to conduct electricity, so electrons can freely move to fill gaps and create new bonds before the material breaks). As a strict comparison between types of metals (e.g. varieties of steel), crystalline forms are more ductile because the electrons can take a more direct, linear route rather than passing through the randomness in amorphous metal. This is the main goal in annealing - cooling a hot piece of metal very slowly allows internal crystals to form (such as pearlite, in steel), allowing an increase in ductile strength (and often electrical conductivity!). Impact strength - the ability to withstand a large compression force without breaking - is largely based on the opposite effect. If the particles in a material slip past each other in the direction you hit it, the material would deform very easily on impact. Therefore, amorphous solids tend to have greater impact strength, since the bonds are more random and can't easily all be broken in one direction. (Most plastics naturally have fairly high impact strength, because the molecules are very long chains that bond together in almost any direction.) Back to metals, though: this is one of the goals of quenching. When a metal is hot enough, the bonds start to break down and the particles start to move more freely, almost like in a liquid but still rigid enough to hold together. Cooling it very quickly allows the metal to retain that randomized, amorphous structure (like the "austenite phase" in steel), so it has a very high impact strength. Last point (I promise!): metal workers will often quench a steel piece to form that amorphous, high-impact-strength austenite layer on the outside, but then temper it (heating it several times, slowly, to get the same effect as annealing but at a low temperature) to form pearlite on the inside. This allows it to withstand high impacts on the outside, distributing the force around the internal crystaline structure, while also allowing it to be slightly ductile and withstand tension and torsion.


Question: Why are simple things such as popping your fingers so addicting?

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 Why are simple things such as popping your fingers so addicting?

I mean for me, popping my fingers relieves a little bit of tension in them. I can *feel* that little bit of pressure that makes my fingers stiff to move, and popping them relieves that pressure. That audible pop is satisfying too. Little things like that are addicting because its removing discomfort and rewards us with a little teeny bit of dopamine. I've also noticed that if I'm feeling extra anxious or stressed I try to crack my fingers *a LOT* more than usual. Probably related.


Question: how did the WSB GME short work and how did people earn money on it?

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</answer>
 how did the WSB GME short work and how did people earn money on it?

Shorting a stock basically means you are making a big bet that the price of a stock will go down. Basically, you borrow some stock, sell it right away and hope you can buy the stock at a lower price in the future when you have to return the stock to the person you borrowed it from. It's a very risky bet because if the stock's value goes up instead of down, the losses can be huge, much larger than the original amount of money. If the stock triples in value, you lose double your money. When it works, like when a stock collapses, you can make huge amounts like when people shorted stocks just before the 2008 crash.


Question: Why is there so much USA currency (quarters/nickels/dimes) circulating in Canada and can it be exchanged at a bank for Canadian change with the exchange rate? Why or why not?

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 Why is there so much USA currency (quarters/nickels/dimes) circulating in Canada and can it be exchanged at a bank for Canadian change with the exchange rate? Why or why not?

There's a fair amount of Canadian currency circulating in the US as well. For the most part, small change is inter-changeable between the two nations and there no exchange rate applied when making a purchase. But if you insist, yes, you can absolutely exchange it at a bank. Just note some banks may have minimums, charge a fee or direct you to a kiosk (particularly for coinage) which will charge you an even larger fee (yay fees!). Alternately you may be able to deposit it has cash into your Canadaland bank account at a lower rate.


Question: Why does alcohol relieve anxiety?

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 Why does alcohol relieve anxiety?

Because your brain gets poisoned so you don’t give a damn. They day after is a whole different story A more specific explanation can be this: (google helped me) Alcohol is a sedative and a depressant that affects the central nervous system. At first, drinking can reduce fears and take your mind off of your troubles. It can help you feel less shy, give you a boost in mood, and make you feel generally relaxed.


Question: how can aldi offer something for less?

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 how can aldi offer something for less?

Lower profit margins, lower overhead. The whole Aldi operation is meant to minimize cost. From the LED lighting in the coolers, low staff sizes, carts you need a coin to unlock, it's all designed to save the company money. The less they spend the less cost they have to cover meaning their products can be sold for less and still make money.


Question: How is Nintendo Switch emulation already so smooth when systems like N64 and Saturn still have issues?

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 How is Nintendo Switch emulation already so smooth when systems like N64 and Saturn still have issues?

The switch uses a pretty well documented SoC (Tegra X1), the operating system is FreeBSD based and borrows some components from Android, and the OS also shares code with the 3dS system software. So there are a lot of knowns to work with. The Saturn and n64, on the other hand, utilized custom chips and black magic.


Question: Why GPU can has thousands of cores while CPU only has a few?

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 Why GPU can has thousands of cores while CPU only has a few?

GPUs have a lot of cores that are very simple. CPUs have a few cores that are very sophisticated. Often it's not practical to split up the work to run on lots of simple cores, so CPUs are better. For example, one core can't make a decision based on what another core is doing, so if you have a long list of decisions, it has to happen on the same core.


Question: How does languages with other alphabets get wrote in English?

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 How does languages with other alphabets get wrote in English?

You mean words from languages that don't use Latin letters? The different ways to write are called "scripts", Latin letters (what we use) is one such script, Cyrillic is another. There's a process called transcription. You take a word from a language using one script and listen to the sounds, its pronunciation, and then you try to imitate the sound with the characters of the other script. This can work more or less well, depending on what sounds each language uses. For example, the Japanese word for Japan is にほん. The first character is pronounced "ni", the second "ho", the third "n". So this is pretty straightforward, we'd write "nihon". Slightly more complicated is Japan's capital, とうきょう. The first character is "to", so far so good. The second character on its own is pronounced "oo", but here it means that the vowel in "to" is elongated. So the first two characters together are pronounced "toh". The third and fourth characters are combined to form the sound "kyo" and then we have another elongation from the fifth character, to make it "kyoh". So why isn't the capital of Japan called "Tohkyoh" in English? Because there are several ways you may want to transcribe words, several systems. Some try to replicate the pronunciation of the entire word as closely as possible, some try to replicate the individual characters, some just try to make it easy for readers of the other language to read and pronounce words fairly correctly. This is why you might see things like Toukyou (each character individually), Tōkyō (showing that the "o"s are long) or just Tokyo (making it easy for English readers) or even Tokio (for German readers). Another example btw maybe the name of the President of Ukraine. His name is transcribed for English readers as "Zelenskiy" or "Zelensky" because reading these out loud with the rules of the English language gives you a result that is close enough to the native pronunciatian. For German readers, it's "Selenskij" or "Selenski" because German pronunciation rules are different. Did this help?


Question: How do wireless charge pads charge your phone battery?

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 How do wireless charge pads charge your phone battery?

The concept is called "electrical induction". A current in a conductor creates a magnetic field around it (you probably made an electromagnet in school with a coil around a nail) and in turn a changing magnetic field creates a current in nearby conductors. This is how electric generators turn physical movement into electricity and how electric motors turn electricity into movement. In the case of the phone charger it is using electricity to generate a changing magnetic field which bridges the gap and then creates a current in the conductors of the phone to charge it.


Question: How does the Fast Fourier Transform work?

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 How does the Fast Fourier Transform work?

To start at the beginning. A Fourier series is a sum of sine and cosines with different frequencies that approximates a function. The more frequencies you include, the better the approximation. The exact weightings of the sine and cosine terms depends which function you are trying to approximate. The weightings are called the amplitudes or Fourier elements (FE's). The Fourier transform (FT) can be thought of as a way of working out the amplitudes needed to fit a Fourier series to a function, and then arranging those amplitudes in order of frequency. The discrete Fourier transform (DFT) is an algorithm that computes the FT for discrete data. Naively, you can just replace all the integrals with sums (as integrals are just the continuous version of sums). To compute the DFT you need to solve [this]( URL_0 ) equation for each data point. This is slow because if you have N data points, you need N^2 operations (N for the sum in the equation*N data points). The FFT refers to any algorithm that can compute the discrete fourier transform (DFT) in O(n log n) time. One algorithm relies on the fact that each DFT of N data points can be found by combining the DFTs of half the data (i.e. N/2 data points). Finding the DFT of two shorter lists is a factor of four more efficient that finding the DFT of one large list, (N/2)^2 vs N^2 operations. Repeating this process until you only have one number in each list gives you an O(n log n) complexity. This 'divide and conquer' method is used in other algorithms such as quicksort. Technically with the above algorithm you can only compute FFTs when N is a power of two, but there are other algorithms without this limitation and you can always pad your data to the nearest power of two. I hope that quick overview is helpful.


Question: Why Does Time Feel So Slow After Staying Up Past 24 Hours?

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 Why Does Time Feel So Slow After Staying Up Past 24 Hours?

I don't think our feeling of time is well understood at all. Like we know that some drugs drastically change the subjective passage of time from feeling like time stopped when someone is smoking salvia even though the effects only last for under 5 minutes. So I reckon that the simply stress put on your body and brain by staying awake too long works in a similar way. Especially if you are bored as well as disrupting your circadian rhythm. There's some theories that biological 'pulses' like the heart rate are used by some parts of your brain to determine passage of time, but that doesn't explain everything weird with time perception. Btw, keeping a depressed person awake for 24 hours drastically reduces the depression in the majority of cases, but those symptoms come back the moment you get a few hours of sleep. This is also not yet explained, like most stuff in our brains above the basic biochemistry. URL_0


Question: Why does being outside in the cold cause a runny nose/other cold like symptoms? I was under the impression that cold weather causing a cold was a myth.

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 Why does being outside in the cold cause a runny nose/other cold like symptoms? I was under the impression that cold weather causing a cold was a myth.

A runny nose due to the cold is not the same as having a cold... The purpose of your nose is to warm and humidify and warm I coming air before it gets to your lungs. When it's cold, your nose ramps up mucus production because cold air is dry and it needs more to achieve that goal.


Question: When it rains, is there a point that you could go to that the rain would fully stop? Could you stand a few yards away from an area covered in rain and watch it? How does that sort of thing work?

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 When it rains, is there a point that you could go to that the rain would fully stop? Could you stand a few yards away from an area covered in rain and watch it? How does that sort of thing work?

Yes, the wind might carry it a bit from the cloud edge but there is a cut off, otherwise when it rains somewhere it would be raining everywhere across the world at the same time. Rain basically falls straight down from the cloud so wherever isn't under cloud won't be getting rain until the cloud moves there (again, barring wind factors) One time it was cloudy and raining in my backyard but my front yard was still sunny and dry as that's just where the clouds happened to be. It didn't last long as the clouds moved over and covered it all but it was a good 5 minutes.


Question: What actually happens when you watch porn and you get a Boner, How brain works and send message to your private part to get erect?

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 What actually happens when you watch porn and you get a Boner, How brain works and send message to your private part to get erect?

We have a few neurological pathways. Think of these as voluntary pathways (blinking, moving your limbs, speaking etc.), and then nonvoluntary pathways (such as your heart rate being regulated etc.). The nonvoluntary pathways is called the autonomic nervous system - and is separated into two segments; the sympathetic branches, and the parasympathetic branches. These are more commonly known as your fight vs. flight responses. When you get aroused, it stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system. This has a few effects in general, but specifically for the penis it causes a dilation (widening) of the blood vessels, and it causes more blood to fill the anatomy of it. Because of the way the anatomy of the penis and its surroundings are, the influx of blood gets maintained and you end up maintaining an erection. That's the basics of it.