Question: How do DLL-files work and what was the (historical) problem they solve?

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 How do DLL-files work and what was the (historical) problem they solve?

They are shared libraries. It's just ordinary code, like you end up with in any executable file, but put in one place that \*any\* program that goes looking for them can find them. The only difference with a DLL is that it publicly says "Hey, I have a function called DrawOnScreen inside me, and another called PlaySound" or whatever. Executables don't normally do that, but DLLs have to so that you know how to use them. This means that you have one place to go to, and everyone can use that same function inside that same DLL, without having to duplicate code. When you're programming, and you want to interact with something that's common to a lot of programs (like opening and closing files, etc.) then you would generally use a DLL. The DLL can be closed-source, it can be different for each graphics card / sound card / architecture / whatever. You very likely have no idea how it works, because it's something written by someone else and you probably won't have the source code (e.g. to Windows DLLs). But it will tell you what it has inside it, and it will have documentation that tells you what it can do and how to use it. This prevents repetition of code over and over again in every program. It stops you having to code your program against EVERY possible combination of hardware, OS, etc. (you just have Microsoft provide a standard DLL interface, and how it actually PlaySound's on that particular computer, that's Microsoft's problem, not yours). And it means that you can interact with a system that you don't know the internal details of, and don't need to know. But they are, in particular, DYNAMIC libraries - shared libraries that are loaded at run-time (rather than have to be around when you compile the program - you do need SOME parts of them at compile-time, the bits that tell you what functions they have inside them, so that the compiler knows what's going on). So your program starts and one of the first things it has to do is locate the DLL on disk, ask it what functions are available, and then work out where those functions are inside the DLL. At the lowest level, the LoadLibrary C function on Windows (dlopen on Linux) will find the library and load it into memory. And the GetProcAddress (dlsym) function will let you find out where the code you're looking for actually is in the DLL, and lets you call it directly from memory. It's more complicated than a static library, but now you can "upgrade" just the DLL on its own and fix problems in, say, networking, graphics, etc. without having to actually recompile every program that uses them. Imagine having to send out a new version of your program every time a driver or Windows DLL changes! So you can have a program that's 20 years old but always using the very latest "OpenGL32.DLL" to play games, or whatever. Historically, DLLs would cause all kinds of problems on Windows, because it didn't really lock down how to use them properly enough. So a central, core DLL that everyone uses might be in use, and then someone bundles that same DLL - but a different version - with their program, and then you end up with two different versions, and only one could be in memory at a time (because they're called the same thing), and one might be up-to-date and bug-fixed and have different code inside, and the other doesn't. One might even crash your machine because it's old and out-of-date, and the other doesn't. This used to cause MERRY HELL with programs, and installers had to learn to check versions of absolutely everything, and sometimes there was little you could do to fix it that would work on EVERYONE'S system (you want to use A.DLL... your customer has v3 installed. You need v2 for your program. v2 and v3 aren't compatible - what are you going to do? Delete his v3 and replace it with v2? You just broke some other program or even his entire system. Or leave his v3 and then your program crashes and never works because it needs v2?). Microsoft eventually fixed that, so now programs each have their own idea of what DLL they are using, so you can have multiple versions of the same DLL in memory at the same time, and one program will use v2, while another will use v3. This instead gives you security problems instead where you think you've upgraded that dodgy DLL that has a security issue, but in fact some programs are still using the old, insecure version! Cygwin, especially, suffered enormously from this. Cygwin1.dll was not on anyone's machine, obviously - Microsoft don't exactly put it into Windows. So each program that uses Cygwin MUST bundle the DLL with it. But the DLL, though versioned, was always called Cygwin1.dll. And anyone could make a Cygwin1.dll from their machine and they were often very different depending on who made them and on what machine. And say your programs loads a DLL that interacted with other DLLs that were also built with Cygwin (often badly!), and often those DLLs tried to load Cygwin1.dll as well in order to work! So you had a mess of different versions of the same DLL all trying to load for just one program, and they often interacted badly or just didn't work at all. This leads to enormous problems where vastly different versions are required, often decades different, and programs are built with the expectation that they are running on a particular version. Upgrade the system version of Cygwin1.dll and you might well break other programs. Don't, and your program won't work. If the user detects that Cygwin1.dll was the problem, they might well try and find a "new" version and copy it into your program folder... same problems occur. Most of the time, the fix was "just delete all other files called Cygwin1.dll and reboot" and then it would try to use one central shared version rather than the version bundled with the program. And the reboot was often necessary to clear out old versions of Cygwin that were still in use by other programs. DLLs exist on Linux and other systems too, where they're called shared libraries (and the same code can be inserted into your program "statically" (i.e. you put the code in as part of your program and it stays inside it and you never need to load a DLL), or "dynamically" (where it looks for the library on the computer that you run the program on every time you run that program). They work much better on other systems, which is why Cygwin in particular struggled - people programmed them as if it were a Linux shared library when in fact it ended up as a Windows one and you had problems because of the difference in the way each system handles things. Linux has well-organised shared libraries. They tend to be backwards-compatible, and they never use the same name if they're not backwards-compatible (e.g. libc5 and libc6 are entirely different shared libraries and you can't accidentally load one if you meant the other). They are generally stored in a very specific place so that they are indeed shared (and not like on Windows where almost every program has its own copy of the shared library, which defeats the point!). They can also be upgraded while programs are still using them (which Windows can't do!) - the code is replaced on disk, and the next time a program asks for that DLL, it's given the new version, while all the existing running programs that still have it open still get the old version. There's not anywhere near as many problems with shared libraries on other OS because of things like that. DLLs / shared libraries are a great idea, but if you're sloppy they turn into a problem with your program which can be a real pain to resolve (and usually the resolution is to try to "fix" your customer's computer so that it has the right software on it to start, which can break other things). Cygwin is a particularly sloppy example, they really should have handled it better, but they are far from alone in having DLL programs on Windows. But MinGW never had similar problems. And they were the cause of years of "Well, it works on our development machine, there must be something wrong with your computers, you should reinstall" problems with lazy programmers and their support departments. Source: I code cross-platform using Cygwin, MinGW and port my and other's code to/from Linux and Windows. And I manage networks, so I came across all kinds of lazy programming nightmares.


Question: So many meds warn not to mix with alcohol. Why? What exactly is alcohol doing to make them dangerous?

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 So many meds warn not to mix with alcohol. Why? What exactly is alcohol doing to make them dangerous?

The enzymes in the liver which is used to metabolize alcohol is also used to metabolize a lot of different substances including a lot of drugs. When you drink a lot of alcohol you bind up these enzymes preventing them from metabolizing other things. This changes the way that the medicines metabolize over time. The effect is different in different medications of course because they work differently and have different metabolazion pathways. With some medication it might be possible to take more or less medication to get the same effect while in others you can get buildup of toxic metabolic byproducts that should have been handled by the liver. There was also a different reason why people were told to not drink alcohol while on antibiotics. These drugs are often used to treat sexually transferable diseases. And while they might cure the symptoms fairly quickly you can still infect others. And doctors found it hard to get people to stop having sex, especially as people struggling with sexually transferable diseases were often the ones getting drunk on the town and hooking up with people. So they told a white lie and instead instructed peolpe to not drink alcohol on antibiotics which was much easier to for people to follow and helped reduce the spread of diseases.


Question: Billion year old water was recently discovered on earth. How old can water get?

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 Billion year old water was recently discovered on earth. How old can water get?

Not sure what you mean by billion year old water? How do you define the age of water? Pretty much all the atoms on earth are billions of years old. If you see them as particles, not waves, at least... Most water on earth arrived billions of years ago. But since then almost all of it have been inside or part of countless rocks, mud shoals, bacteria, virys, microbes, plants and animals. Does it still count as "water" or do you start counting age from zero every time it is exhaled by a mosquito or evaporate from a leaf stomats? Even water sealed under ice or in the abyssal sea is in constant flu between being water molecules or being split into a proton (H+) and a base (OH-) component, and mostly re-form water molecules with a different atom. Is that old water re-arranged or new water?


Question: Why do some elements have bracketed numbers at the end?

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 Why do some elements have bracketed numbers at the end?

Cu(subscript)2 means that you have two atoms of copper combined, which as far as I'm aware doesn't happen in real life. You use that for O2. (Oxygen found naturally is almost always found as two oxygen atoms bound together). The II at the end signifies that this copper has a charge of +2. Non-metallic atoms usually have an oxidation state depending on where they are at the periodic table (Hydrogen is +1 and oxygen is -2. Water (H2O) therefore has an overall charge of 0, since it has two +1s and one -2). Since metals usually follow different rules than nonmetals, and can have different charges, we use Roman numerals to show the charge of atoms in non-organic and metallic compounds. For instance, there's copper (I) sulfide and copper (II) sulfide. This doesn't mean that one has two atoms of copper and the other doesn't. They both have an atom of copper and an atom of sulfur, but in one case the copper atom has a +2 charge and in the other it has a +1. If it was written Cu(subscript)2 S, it would mean that there were two atoms of copper for every sulfur atom in the compound.


Question: Why do people on sinking ships/battleships die. If sinking takes multiple hours and there are enough rescue boats or nearby boats to swim to, why does nearly all of the crew die?

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 Why do people on sinking ships/battleships die. If sinking takes multiple hours and there are enough rescue boats or nearby boats to swim to, why does nearly all of the crew die?

Large ships are big. You can end up a long way from any exit. The situations that cause a ship to eventually sink can be very violent. You can easily be injured. Power is lost and lighting can fail early on - this means that persons get lost in the dark trying to find an exit. If the ship tilts sideways, then a person can 'fall' across the tilted decks, getting injured or killed. This means that some casualties are likely. If there are rescue boats nearby, and/or adequate life boats, then many o most of the crew will survive. Situations where almost the whole crew is lost are when other ships are not available, and life boats damaged by whatever caused the ship to sink.


Question: Why is student debt a big problem in America?

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 Why is student debt a big problem in America?

Government: we are going to start giving loans, so more people can go to college. Universities: well, since you're giving this money, we're going to raise costs so that we can receive the most possible. Students: you realize that we'll have to pay this off, and that it's not just a gift right? Universities: Shh bby is okay


Question: How point systems, like on Snapchat and Reddit, motivate people to participate even though they contribute no tangible value like money or rewards?

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 How point systems, like on Snapchat and Reddit, motivate people to participate even though they contribute no tangible value like money or rewards?

Note: I don't have a Snapchat, So I'll be speaking from a Reddit perspective. Disclaimer: There are so many other niches and elements of the system that I didn't touch on, simply because I didn't know about it, didn't think about it, didn't have time to mention it, or any other number of reasons. This post is just a surface scratch of why the upvote and downvote system works. Human psychology is an incredibly deep and vague subject of which I don't have nearly the credentials to really claim to know what's true and what's not. Part of it is purely because it indicates social acceptance. If someone likes your post, they upvote it. And social acceptance, if functioning correctly, should make you subconsciously feel a little good. It's built into human nature, otherwise we wouldn't be social animals. Another part of it is because it makes the system tangible and measurable, which commonly makes things more appealing to humans, as opposed to vague or entirely indeterminate measurement systems. Imagine if you wrote some blog post on some blog site: would you want it to have an indicator that simply says "This post is doing well!" with an image of a small fire next to it (and nothing at all if it does poorly), or a counter of how many views it's had? It's generally more fun to see it go from some number like 1,100 when you go to sleep, and wake up to 2,310. Even better if it suddenly made it big somehow and jumped from 1.5k to 300k overnight. Being quantifiable simply makes things feel more controllable, or at least observable. As to motivation to upvote someone else's content: A common reason is to show appreciation because it was better than the average post or comment. Maybe it made you giggle, or they provided some extremely in-depth answer, or they're a novelty account that does its job well. In any case, showing appreciation is like an honest "Thank you", and makes both parties feel good on the inside. Another common reason is to help sort out what's good and bad content. If it's ad-spam; downvote and report. If it's some fan art of something you like, or a funny post, or an interesting video, you upvote it to help others see it, and also to help a post that you like get the attention that you think it deserves. As for comments, it's the same way. When sorted by "hot" or "best", AskReddit threads almost always sort themselves out into really good comments at the top, and mediocre comments at the bottom, save for the exception when an answer is late to the party and ends up sitting at 1 karma. That sense of helping a fellow human out also triggers that feelgood sensation, because again, if being positively social benefits the species, then it's a good system for the brain to reward. ^^1 I forgot to talk about the case in which downvotes affect the user experience. Basically, it's the "negative feedback" response. So, like it seems, you downvote content that you don't like, be it because it doesn't contribute, because it might be factually wrong, because you don't think someone should see it, or because you disagree with it. In some of these cases--where you downvote because of the appropriate reasons--it ties back around to the feeling of contributing to society, which makes you feel like a necessary cog in the social machine. After all, you did your part in making that out-of-place NSFL shock link or extremely aggressive and rude comment more invisible from the eyes of the rest of the community. You've cleaned out part of the trash. In the other cases--in which you downvote because you disagree--it provides a *different* rewarding feeling, albeit more self-aligned. It might make you feel superior. It might make you feel like you're "more right" for having more karma on your post. In a very heated Reddit debate, there might be one side which is consistently negative in karma, whereas the other side is consistently positive in karma (usually due to the audience which is viewing it). The side which is positive feels like they have a group behind them, whereas the other party is a solo individual who doesn't stand a chance, and might be completely wrong. In turn, you once again feel like you've aligned with society, and get rewarded for it. --------- TL;DR it feels good to upvote content, and receive upvotes in turn. This TLDR doesn't help much. You should read the full comment. ---------- Edit: two comments have explicitly told me about their upvotes. It feels good. Let me express an honest thank you in return. This makes me even happier. (In case another example is needed, refer to this edit.) Edit 2: an insightful comment from /u/MNGrrl has prompted me to add another section to my comment---though not necessarily directly related to their comment, but rather a tangent of it which I failed to mention. It's notated with a ^^1 superscript.


Question: Are driverless cars at the point where, faced with a crisis, they can choose to hit a tree instead of a child?

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 Are driverless cars at the point where, faced with a crisis, they can choose to hit a tree instead of a child?

No, the self driving cars of today can't make "lesser of two evils" decisions. But lets approach this philosophically for a second. What you're describing is a version of the trolley problem where the subject (the car in this case) is required to make moral decisions about which person(s) to kill. In this case, the decision is between the passenger(s) of the car and a child who runs into the road. I would argue that even when cars can determine that it is a living human child that has run into the road, that the car should not endanger the passengers. Obviously the car should apply breaks as soon and as hard as possible, but swerving should only be an action to avert collision entirely and never to decide which thing to hit. This stance rests on a few points: 1. If there's a protocol in the self driving car that prompts it to kill or endanger the passengers, then it can be tricked into killing the passengers. 2. I won't buy a car that might decide to hurt me for some reason. 3. If cars and the software engineers behind them make those decisions, they become liable for those decisions, opening a legal and moral can of worms that nobody wants to touch. Imagine if the car swerves, killing the passenger and 10 old people in order to miss 3 children. Who decides that my life and those of 10 old people is greater than the children? Are 3 children even worth 11 adults? The answer to that question depends on who you ask. It's far better to not force the car to make that decision at all because... 4. Above all else, cars on the road need to be **predictable**. That's the whole point here. The goal of the self-driving car is not perfection. The goal is a highly predictable and safer-than-human driver.


Question: when you make a return to a store, why do they insist on refunding the cost to the original method of payment? Why does it matter?

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 when you make a return to a store, why do they insist on refunding the cost to the original method of payment? Why does it matter?

I worked the service desk at a grocery store (US) and from what I remember it is due to fraud issue/trail of funds. Too many times people have asked for cash back for the refund and then had someone else come back to ask for the same refund cash again or on card, etc. So, unless requested or they didn't have a receipt (which means we put it on a store gift card to use as store credit) it goes back the same way it was paid.


Question: From my 5 yo, why is everything in space round?

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 From my 5 yo, why is everything in space round?

Short answer, yes. Every planet and star is made by gravity pulling matter together whether that’s a gas cloud or solid particles floating around. Gravity acts equally in all directions from an objects center of mass, so as the matter begin to clump together, the sphere is the shape that is formed. I believe the rotation come from collisions with other objects in space.


Question: Why is it that some substances can only be certain phases? Like plastic and steel can be liquid or solid but not gaseous, and wood can only be solid, for example.

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 Why is it that some substances can only be certain phases? Like plastic and steel can be liquid or solid but not gaseous, and wood can only be solid, for example.

There are several issues going on here. First, transitioning from one phase to another involves a pretty significant exchange in energy. Sometimes that energy may result in intermolecular bonds breaking down. When this happens, it essentially becomes a different kind of substance. This can be exacerbated by the presence of other chemicals, such as oxygen, which may result in combustion. Secondly, some materials such as "wood" aren't a pure substance. "Wood" is made up of a vareity of different kinds of materials, each of which have their own chemical and physical properties. In this sense "wood" can only exist as a solid because of what we've defined as "wood" in the same way that ice can only exist as a solid. Even though it doesn't undergo any chemical change, ice stops being ice because the "solidness" of it is part of the definition.


Question: Why does whole grain food cost more if it presumably requires less processing?

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 Why does whole grain food cost more if it presumably requires less processing?

When you have a production line optimized for one product, it takes extra effort to make it do something else, even if it involves doing less. In the case of whole grains, it is not just less processing. Whole grains have different textures, tastes, and baking properties, so you have to change ingredients, mixing procedures, baking times and temperatures, and other parts of the production process.


Question: If you park a stick shift car correctly (leaving it in gear with parking break on) and get towed by the rear of the car, what happens to your gearbox?

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 If you park a stick shift car correctly (leaving it in gear with parking break on) and get towed by the rear of the car, what happens to your gearbox?

Nothing much happens to the gearbox. The gears will rotate in either direction just the same. However the damage comes when the tow spins the engine. Which is why tow truck drivers never tow by the drive wheels. They tow the other axle. Unless it's an all wheel drive car, then they flatbed it.


Question: How do scientists date prehistoric footprints? Wouldn’t the stone with the imprints be much older than the footprint?

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 How do scientists date prehistoric footprints? Wouldn’t the stone with the imprints be much older than the footprint?

Prehistoric footprints are not made in stone, because of course you can't leave a footprint in a rock. What you can do is leave a footprint in something like mud, ~~with~~ which over millions of years mineralizes and becomes rock(y). You can date the footprint by dating the resulting rock if you're lucky, or with careful examination of surrounding geological layers (called strata) which can give you other dates. If you're very *very* lucky maybe a bug or leaf was squashed in there and fossilized as well, and you can get some approximate dating by identifying it. In short, archeologists and paleontologists have a huge array of tools they use in various combinations to come to these conclusions.


Question: How did Google create all the 3d objects in Google Earth?

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 How did Google create all the 3d objects in Google Earth?

They use a technique called [photogammetry]( URL_0 ) with photos from aircraft. It takes multiple photos from different viewpoints, identifies points of common features (such as the corner of a building), and knowing the camera position and direction when the photos were taken, algorithms can determine where in 3D space where the point is. It's the same thing our brains do with our own eyes.


Question: Is the Periodic Table of Elements complete?

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 Is the Periodic Table of Elements complete?

An element 119 is certainly possible; in fact, it may be possible to create elements (artificially in a lab) with extremely high atomic numbers. More likely, however, is that there is a practical limit after which larger atoms are too unstable to exist for any amount of time. This happens for two reasons: electron orbital velocity and the inherent radioactivity of larger nuclei. Let's imagine that we are attempting to create a VERY large element - perhaps with an atomic number of 140. This element would have a large nucleus filled with 140 protons and however many neutrons are required to keep the nucleus stable for a measurable amount of time. The larger our atom gets (higher atomic number), the faster the electrons around it must travel in the higher energy levels - the bigger the nucleus, the larger amount of space the electron must cover in a similar amount of time. The speed of light is the upper limit for these electrons' velocities. The best models we have predict that this we would reach this limit around atomic number 173. Beyond that, the electrons would be moving faster than the speed of light - this is a rule that has no known exceptions, so 173 is the limit for us. All of this is provided our understanding of electrons and how they interact with the nucleus is correct! Finally, large nuclei are inherently radioactive - they want to split and decay into smaller pieces on their own. The speed at which these natural splits happen is indicated by an element's half life - the average amount of time it takes for half of a sample of the element to decay into other elements. In our imaginary super-large element, the half-life may be so short that the nucleus doesn't exist long enough to allow electrons to gather around it. No electrons = no stability = no element. All of this is to say that theoretically atoms heavier than Oganesson *could* exist, but the rules are actively working against us.


Question: How is it that when Little Hotties hand warmers get wet they stop working, then they work again once dry?

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 How is it that when Little Hotties hand warmers get wet they stop working, then they work again once dry?

They're reacting with the air, and the water prevents the air from the getting to the iron inside the packs, when they dry out they can resume reacting. More importantly when they're wet they clump up and very little surface area is available, thus no heat, when they're dry they can be more powdery which allowed plenty of surface area to react and generate heat.


Question: What exactly is a superposition?

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 What exactly is a superposition?

Superposition is essentially existing in various states of existence simultaneously. We know it applies to particles (all particles), and it seems to apply to collections of particles, and may even apply to the entire universe. To tie it into things like quantum spin, it just means that if there are multiple states of spin a particle can have, then it simultaneously has all of them (at least until you measure it - more on that later). So if an electron can spin clockwise or counterclockwise, it's actually in a superposition of spinning both clockwise ad counterclockwise at the same time. That's not a typo - superposition means that it is spinning both ways simultaneously. Now we don't know whether it actually is doing that, or whether our limited knowledge or lack of access to what's really going on deep down (to be colloquial) is to blame, but from our perspective, the electron referenced above is truly and really spinning both clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time. To accept this, you have to drop all expectations that the quantum world of particles behaves anything like the classical world you can see, touch, etc. In our classical world, superposition seems not to exist (although Schrodinger's Cat implies that it does). There are various schools of thought about this - some say the world exists in superposition until we "observe" it (and there's plenty to discuss about what observe means), some say the entanglement involved in classical systems eliminates superposition at the classical level, some say it's illusory and that all possible quantum states exist simultaneously, including other realities where another version of you (which is NOT you) is reading this. But this is all way beyond ELI5. And if you're confused by it all, that just means you're on the right track - no one understands quantum mechanics (as Prof. Feyman says), but some people are able to follow the math and work out what it seems to imply. Regarding terms like "spin" and "color" as applied to particles - these are labels of convenience we apply that have at best a loosely analogous connection to how a particle behaves and the properties it has that distinguish it from other particles. While electrons have something we call "spin," there's literally nothing to spin the way we think of a ball spinning. It seems there is some feature of an electron akin to angular momentum, but it's not angular momentum. Still, we use the concept and term to do the math. Same with terms like color, flavor, etc. These are just labels used by physicists that represent distinct properties of particles and systems, but there's no color or flavor possible at the sub-atomic levels involved. Don't know whether this clears anything up or just leaves things murkier, but if it's the latter, you're in good company. Physicists will do the math, but generally won't claim to have any intuitive understanding of the ins and outs of quantum mechanics.


Question: How does taxes work for international companies?

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 How does taxes work for international companies?

ELI5: So it's like homework, you give it to the teacher in which class you're in. ELI10: So you pay taxes on the money earned in that country. ELI15: A multinational company can exploit some tax loopholes, but in theory, if they have a company in a country, whatever they sell in that country (goods or services), are revenue in that country, and taxed accordingly. This is ELI5, so I won't expand :)


Question: Why does our brain eventually start to hear patterns of sound in a looping white noise track?

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 Why does our brain eventually start to hear patterns of sound in a looping white noise track?

You are here today because your ancestors were great at finding patterns The human brain is wired to find patterns. They let you predict things like herd movement and predator attacks which kept your ancestors alive and fed. A side effect of this is that it goes hunting for patterns and sometimes finds them in places where they don't actually exist It's better to see and hear too many patterns than too few


Question: Even though the sun appears yellow, why do bright white LEDS (2300-3000K) light up a room the same way the sun does, but warmer toned lights/LEDs have a yellow/orange tinge?

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 Even though the sun appears yellow, why do bright white LEDS (2300-3000K) light up a room the same way the sun does, but warmer toned lights/LEDs have a yellow/orange tinge?

Because sunlight is actually primarily white like, in space the sun is completely white. The only reason it looks yellow to us when we look up at it is because the atmosphere filters out a bit of the other colors of light leaving it look yellow to our eyes. But it is still pretty much the full spectrum of light waves


Question: Why would big CEOs funnel money into hiring new employees/investing in local infrastructure/supporting the economy for tax write offs?

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 Why would big CEOs funnel money into hiring new employees/investing in local infrastructure/supporting the economy for tax write offs?

> If I know I'm going to be taxed, why go out and spend more money to be taxed less? Wouldn't it just be redundant? If you spend money, you get something for it. If you get taxed, the money is gone. If the government was gonna tax my $1 unless I spent it, I could spend it on a hot dog, and now I'm down one dollar but I have a hot dog. If they just taxed it, I'd be down one dollar and have *no* hot dog.


Question: Why can you hear the low rumble of a train engine from so far away?

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 Why can you hear the low rumble of a train engine from so far away?

Sound waves work a lot like light does. Low frequency waves travel further than high frequency. With light, high frequency = high energy. It frequently interacts with matter. It gets absorbed quickly. Long waves like radio and AM especially travels further as it is absorbed by fewer structures and requires a larger antenna to intercept. Sound waves work the same way. High frequency sound vibrates many surfaces in a way that they absorb the energy of the wave. Even small surfaces acting like a drum can absorb high frequency sound. Lower frequency sounds have fewer surfaces that can absorb them.


Question: Why do lightbulbs go out, but not the lights that illuminate screens on TVs and phones?

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 Why do lightbulbs go out, but not the lights that illuminate screens on TVs and phones?

it is, DLP tvs for example used a honest bulb (though very bright and powerful), and it had a life of a few years. LCD screens use edge lighting, most are LEDs these days (all cell phones), but they used to use compact florescent lights (rarely still do). both have absurdly long lifespans, longer than the devices they are in. but its possible for the backlight to fail. the newest phones (and some TVs) are OLED, which means the screen itself are itsy bitsy LEDs that generate the light themselves. again, super long life.


Question: how exactly do anti missle defense systems work??

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 how exactly do anti missle defense systems work??

Depends on the type of system. Most use radar to identify incoming missiles and the launch a missile to intercept it. Modern interceptor missiles are generally kinetic kill vehicles. Which means they carry no explosives and rely on precision targeting and pure kinetic energy to kill the incoming missile. Older systems like Phalanx, Kashtan, and AK-630 used super-high rate of fire gun systems to shoot down incoming missiles. Once a radar lock was achieved on the target the system would fire hundreds or thousands of 20-30mm projectiles at the incoming missile in an attempt to swat it out of the air. New experimental systems use lasers to destroy missiles and shells. Modern ship, aircraft, and tank anti-missile systems also utilize a wide variety of electronic countermeasures like radar jammers, flares, chaff, dazzling lasers, etc.


Question: What is higher order function in Computer Science?

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 What is higher order function in Computer Science?

In computer science and mathematics, we can think of a function as being a "thing" in its own right, in the same way that a number or a string of characters are things. A higher-order function, then, is a function that takes *other functions* as inputs. A basic mathematical example is the derivative, where the input is the original function and the output is another function that is the derivative of the input. Other examples include things like iteration, where you might have a function that takes in another function and an argument, then applies the input function *twice* to the argument. In the same way that you can have a function that takes in a number and returns its square, you can have a function that takes in a function and returns some other function.


Question: Why did Eastern armies prefer curved swords over the straight swords of their western counterparts?

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 Why did Eastern armies prefer curved swords over the straight swords of their western counterparts?

Ok several reasons here, a lot of it down to the style of fighting, so will try to cover some of it. 1) A curved blade is easier to draw on horseback due to the lack of space. Eastern armies used to have more troops mounted and on smaller horses so this was more of an issue. 2) A curved blade has the centre of balance more towards the tip meaning a slashing blow would do more damage. It also meant that for the same weight of sword it could be made longer. This allowed lightly armed mounted troops to slash rapidly a few times and gallop away. Western mounted troops were intended to blast through the opposing troops rather than harass. 3) A curved blade though lacks the penetrating power of a straight blade against thick armour, western armies were more likely to encounter heavily armoured opposition (or heavy shields). 4) Western troops would sometimes fight dismounted to form a shield wall, whilst curved blades can be used on foot they are not able as easily to be used in a wall like formation where the straight blade can be used in a coordinated stabbing motion.


Question: Why aren't there any successful third party candidates in major United States Elections?

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 Why aren't there any successful third party candidates in major United States Elections?

First Past the Post voting, which is the system we have, encourages strategic voting, which discourages diversity. Basically if a simple plurality wins, then everyone is encouraged to pool together and vote together, and it always devolves into a 2 party system, even in mathematical models. CGP Grey has some really good videos on this. Basically everyone chooses the lesser of two evils until it's just two parties fighting for the few swing people in between.


Question: In pregnancy, does a baby have a higher chance of inheriting 'good' genes if the sperm count is higher?

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</answer>
 In pregnancy, does a baby have a higher chance of inheriting 'good' genes if the sperm count is higher?

Not at all, usually the fastest sperm dies, actually. It takes several sperm cells to weaken the egg before one can get in, and the genetic material is pretty random, so the count from one million to two million wouldn't make that much of a difference. Also, there is no correlation between the sperm speed and what would be considered "good genes" in the environment, it's pretty much random.


Question: How do people get surprised and die in wildfires?

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 How do people get surprised and die in wildfires?

The Camp Fire already has 29 known fatalities and with 200+ people missing that number is probably going to get a lot worse. But that tells you something. Usually wildfire fatalities are a lot lower. If you look at URL_0 you'll notice that only 10 wildfires in CA history have had more than 10 fatalities, and of those, 2 were so high because firefighters got killed. _Usually_ most people evacuate and avoid being killed, with a few either taking unwise chances or just getting unlucky. So why was the Paradise fire so deadly? First, the timeline. The fire started at 6:33 AM on Thursday. By around 6:45 firemen were on the scene of the ignition and observed a rapidly spreading blaze. Shortly after, an evacuation was called for Paradise. So we are talking about an evacuation notice coming out at around 7am. The fire spread incredibly rapidly, driven by hot, dry winds coming down from the mountains at speeds of 40mph. At one point it was burning the equivalent of 80 football fields every minute. It didn't take it long at all to cover the 7-8 miles to Paradise. It was right on top of the town shortly after the evacuation notice went out, and some people would have missed it because they didn't, eg, happen to have the news on. At that point, we come to problem number two, which is that Paradise is kind of a remote community without a lot of ways in and out of town. There's one main road and a few others. Everyone in town was trying to leave by these roads. And of course the fire was coming towards the roads too. It took people hours to make a drive of a few minutes thanks to bumper to bumper traffic, stalled cars on the road, etc. And Paradise had a lot of old people who may not have even been able to drive. At any rate there were a bunch of people who had to try to drive through the fire, and they didn't all make it. Finally, you've got the issue that the blaze swept right _through_ town. This is relatively rare. Usually wildfires stay in the woods, but this has been changing lately. Higher winds, dryer falls, more movement of people out of urban areas into the borders of woods, it all increases the odds of fires getting into inhabited areas. And Paradise in particular used to have a lot of tree cover in town. Lots of oak and deciduous trees with the leaves dry but still on because it hasn't rained yet. Firefighters had to give up on stopping the blaze and just had to try to get people out as best they could.


Question: In music what's the difference between 4/4, 5/4, 5/8, etc?

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 In music what's the difference between 4/4, 5/4, 5/8, etc?

To help keep your place in music, it is divided up into segments called "measures". A time signature (4/4, 3/4, etc) is telling you how many beats are divided up per measure and what kind of notes get the beat. For example, if you're in 4/4, the first number tells you there are 4 beats per measure and the second number tells you that a quarter note (1/4) gets the beat, totalling 4 quarter notes. In the case of 6/8 time, you would have 6 beats per measure and an eighth note (1/8) would get the beat, totalling 6 eighth notes per measure.


Question: How is it possible for some infinities to be larger than others?

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 How is it possible for some infinities to be larger than others?

There are actually a few notions of infinity, so twice infinity is only larger than infinity in certain circumstances. # ∞ The normal sort of infinity, ∞, is the extreme end of the number line. It's the same for the real numbers, integers, whatever. This sort of infinity isn't a number. You can't double it because, if you could, there would be something further on the number line than it, so you'd have to move ∞ further on the number line to begin with. Similarly, you can't add one to it. But you can negate it; ∞ × -1 = -∞. That sort of infinity is the furthest point on a number line containing both positive and negative numbers. # ℵ Another sort of infinity is the size of a set of things -- the _cardinality_ of a set. This is a series of infinities named ℵ. ℵ₀ is the smallest of them, and that's the size of the set of natural numbers. Again, this isn't a number! It's a size of a set, but you can't add 1 to it, and you can't double it. If you can create a mapping between two sets that leaves nothing out on either side, the two sets have the same size. So if we want to map the natural numbers (0, 1, 2, 3, etc) to the counting numbers (1, 2, 3, ...), we can use a simple function: add 1 to a natural number to get the corresponding counting number. And in reverse: subtract 1 from a counting number to get the corresponding natural number. For any natural number, you can get its counting number counterpart; for any counting number, you can get its natural number counterpart. Same thing with the even non-negative numbers and the counting numbers: the forward function is `x / 2 + 1` and the reverse is `(x - 1) * 2`. So you get 0 → 1, 2 → 2, 4 → 3, etc. Same thing with the non-negative numbers and all integers. Here, the forward function is `-1^x * floor(x/2)`, and the reverse function is left as an exercise to the reader. With the prime numbers, you can just identify them in order; there's a first prime number, a second prime number, etc. But you can't make one of these mappings between the counting numbers and the real numbers. Cantor's diagonalization proof gives a way to find a real number you can't have accounted for no matter how you try to map counting numbers to real numbers. So the set of real numbers is ℵ₁, right? ...well, turns out we aren't sure about that. We know it's at *least* ℵ₁, and we tend to believe that it's exactly ℵ₁, but the proof depends on an axiom that we're not quite certain of. # ω The last type of infinity has to do with ordinal numbers, and Cantor's also to blame for them. The idea behind an ordinal number is to specify a *position* in an ordering, just like a cardinal number specifies the size of a set. Ordinal numbers are a bit more like regular numbers than cardinal numbers or regular infinity. You can add 1 to them, and you can multiply them. So let's say you have a set containing the natural numbers (0, 1, 2, 3...) and a bear (🐻). You decide that the proper order for this is to have all the numbers, then the bear. There are ω natural numbers, and then there's one bear. The position for the natural numbers is easy: each number is its own position. The bear is in position ω+1. It has as many elements before it as there are natural numbers; it's in the very next position. With this sort of infinity, 2ω *is* greater than ω! 2ω is the position of the last element of a set containing, say, all the natural numbers and a distinct color for each natural number. And, sure, you can't necessarily count that high even with infinite amounts of time, but you don't have to. You know in advance how many things come before the bear or the last color, so you can start wherever you want.


Question: Why did my Italian Cream Soda turn into half a cup of gelatinous foam?

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 Why did my Italian Cream Soda turn into half a cup of gelatinous foam?

Club soda contains dissolved carbon dioxide. Over time the CO2 will eventually fall out of solution and bubble away. That's why soda goes flat over time. When you poured in the half and half it gave the CO2 bubbles a place to start forming and caused way more CO2 than normal to come out of solution.


Question: How are some musicians (ex: Robbie Williams) able to create so many songs and albums without getting creative burnout or having songs that sound very similar?

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 How are some musicians (ex: Robbie Williams) able to create so many songs and albums without getting creative burnout or having songs that sound very similar?

Many prolific artists have hundreds and hundreds of songs personally written already. Understand, the vast majority of them are mediocre at best. But somewhere in there, there is a gold nugget or two. Another, and more than likely plausible reason is they have help. Lots and lots of it. There are many hundreds of people that write and sell most of the radio music you here today to the stars that perform therm. Whether it's Taupin for Elton John, or Pink for some guy, or many unknown genius songwriters that just don't have the looks, or age to be superstars. Beyoncé does not write all of the songs. Taylor Swift, nah. Lady Gaga, she did a lot of her own stuff.


Question: Why can't you really jump after you've been on a trampoline?

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 Why can't you really jump after you've been on a trampoline?

The same reason you feel like you're flying after you get off a treadmill, just the opposite. On a treadmill, you put in a great deal of effort with essentially zero physical movement, and when you're on a trampoline you get used to putting in relatively little work for a huge physical effect. After you're back on the ground, reality catches up with you and you realize you're not a super hero, essentially.


Question: Why exactly do my hands get wrinkly after they're under water?

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 Why exactly do my hands get wrinkly after they're under water?

The truth is we don't know for sure why that behavior exists. Biologically the wrinkling is something your body does on purpose by constricting the blood vessels in your hands or feet. Why this trait exists isn't 100% clear, but the best theory is that it provides a biological advantage by increasing your ability to grip surfaces underwater. This was able to proved in a study, and is the best hypothesis for the behavior we have thus far.


Question: How do video game mods work?

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 How do video game mods work?

You can't do mods on consoles because they require games to be digitally signed, and the file system is locked down, so there's no way to get mods files in there. Skyrim and Fallout 4 allow mods on PS4 and Xbox One by downloading them in game, and then the game puts the files in the correct spot. Mods work because games are designed to read files to know what need to be loaded next. If you know how to change existing files, or add in new files, then you can change what the game displays or does. Some games have built-in mod support. Bethesda Game Studios provides their creation kit to make modding their games very easy. They use a plug-in system that makes changes when a mod is loaded. There's no detection or protection against mods changing the same thing, so if you have multiple mods that change the same thing then the mods might not work or the game might crash.


Question: Does the old water I dump out my water bottle into the dirt get recycled?

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 Does the old water I dump out my water bottle into the dirt get recycled?

simple answer yes. but its over time, over many process. some might get soaked into the dirt, to be used by a plant or animal, which then is recycled back into the dirt when they die, some might be evaporated into the air, maybe becomes a cloud at some point and rains. but yes. its recycled somehow


Question: How does hydrocarbon release energy when their bonds are broken?

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 How does hydrocarbon release energy when their bonds are broken?

They don't. No energy is ever released when breaking chemical bonds. It always takes energy to do this, like how it takes energy to stretch out a spring beyond it's breaking point. What does release energy is the formation of new bonds. And it just so happens that the formation of CO2 and H2O releases a relatively larger amount than the energy it takes to break the chemical bonds. This makes hydrocarbon combustion exothermic.


Question: why does rain come down as “drops” instead of as a larger mass of water?

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 why does rain come down as “drops” instead of as a larger mass of water?

Water has a tendency to want to stick to itself, this leads to surface tension (where something light like a bug can walk on water) and it is the reason it forms into roughly spherical drops. The cloud is a bunch of mist/fog (ie lots of water floating around in very very small drops). When conditions are right these very small drops will start sticking together, get heavier, and when they get heavy enough, fall as a raindrop. A limiting factor is air resistance while the drop falls. Water likes to stick together, but air resistance is trying to tear it apart. So a massive basketball sized "drop" can't happen because the friction/resistance is too strong. The size of the drop is kind of a balance between to air forces acting on the outside of the drop trying to tear it apart, and the intermolecular forces in the water trying to hold itself together. edit: spelling errors/typos