Question: How does focal length of a lens in a camera affect zoom and focus?

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 How does focal length of a lens in a camera affect zoom and focus?

It's not so much 'zoom' as magnification. Lenses bend light to bring them to a point or focus. The shorter the focal length, the more the light is bent to bring it to a focus - literally a stronger lens bends light more so it focuses closer. Because of this, the amount of light it can bring into that focus is also higher. So a shorter focal length lens will capture a wider area because the lens is powerful enough to bring a wider area into focus at that point. A longer focal length lens is weaker and so brings the light together in a focus further away and does this with a much smaller area. Because it does this it effectively magnifies the image more than a short focal length lens and provides more 'zoom'. Imagine taking a picture of a house. With a short focal length lens, it is powerful enough to focus enough area to capture the whole house. With a longer focal length lens it can only focus enough area to capture one window. i.e. the long focal length lens magnifies more and has zoomed in on the window. The other effect on focus is that with the shorter focal length, more of the picture will be in focus because more light is bent into the focus point. So when you look at the picture the front garden gate the house and the tree behind it might all be in focus. With a long focal length it can't bend as much light together to focus it so something a little closer or further away than the window would be out of focus.


Question: How does buying local support the local economy?

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 How does buying local support the local economy?

The idea is that local businesses are more likely to spend their profits locally, rather than move those out of city/state to the corporate office. Your local Mom & Pop employees local people, but they also likely source products more locally, and hire local businesses for expenses (local accountants, local tradesmen, local lawyers, etc.) They also are more likely to spend the profits locally, since Mom & Pop live in the communities they serve. Contrast this with larger corporate stores, that usually have functions centralized in the corporate office - they employ fewer people locally, use corporate accountants/lawyers, have national contracts for tradesmen, etc. More of the money leaves with these centralized/corporate functions, so less stays in the community supporting other local businesses.


Question: PSR B1620-26 b, is an Exo-Planet 12,400/lightyears away. And it is known to for its extreme age of 12.7Billion years. How do we know it’s actually this old? How are we sure this is true and what do we actually do to get it’s age?

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 PSR B1620-26 b, is an Exo-Planet 12,400/lightyears away. And it is known to for its extreme age of 12.7Billion years. How do we know it’s actually this old? How are we sure this is true and what do we actually do to get it’s age?

We made an assumption that the planet's age is comparable to the age of the starts in its neighborhood. Based on our current understanding of the evolution of planets and stars that's a good assumption but it's possible we're wrong. So we know the star has an exoplanet, and we know the star is in globular cluster Messier 4, and we've estimated that Messier 4 is about 12.7 billion years old, and we believe that the planet and the stars and the cluster formed at about the same time. Based on nuclear physics, we think we have a pretty good idea of how stars evolve so we can tell a lot about the age of stars by their size, mass, colour, and several other things that are (relatively) easy to measure.


Question: What is a derivative function?

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 What is a derivative function?

the derivative is the slope of a function at every point. f(x)=2x has a slope of 2 on the entire graph, so f'(x) = 2. take a look at the cos and sin functions, one is a derivative of the other. at the highest and lowest, the slope is 0 so the derivative is 0, at 0 the slope is 1 so the derivative is 1. also look at e^x that derives to itself. its value at any point is also the value of its slope


Question: - Why do negative numbers exist? What is the concept of negative?

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 - Why do negative numbers exist? What is the concept of negative?

Negative numbers exist because subtracting a smaller number from a bigger one can’t be a positive number, but it’s useful to be able to do that kind of subtraction anyway. For instance, I’ve got a doodad I’m selling for $10, but you only have $5. Rather than telling you no, I can give it to you for the $5 you currently have and you can pay me the other $5 later. 5 - 10 = -5, so your wallet now contains -$5. The negative is a way of indicating that you still have a debt to settle, so even though your wallet is empty, you’re not *really* at $0.


Question: How does smoking make someone's voice deeper/raspier?

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 How does smoking make someone's voice deeper/raspier?

Everything you inhale passes right across the vocal cords. The vocal cords, (whose easy vibration creates your voice), react to irritants like allergens, dry air, dust, chemical odors, reflux, etc. The burning end of a cigarette is 451 degrees Fahrenheit. By the time that air reaches 17-20 cm down your throat it has cooled-off some, but is still hot enough to irritate the delicate vocal folds. Not only that, but the tar and other irritants in the smoke cause swelling and other reactions on the cover of the cords. Repeated, long-term smoking of course causes tissue changes in the voice, also known as dysplasia or cancer. The first sign of glottic cancer (throat cancer) is a hoarse voice, not pain or coughing up blood.


Question: Is there a difference between ‘Celsius’ and ‘Centigrade’?

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 Is there a difference between ‘Celsius’ and ‘Centigrade’?

The distinction between the Celsius and centigrade scales can seem confusing -- but the two terms refer to the same scale of measurement, and both use the same degree designation -- degrees C. The two scales -- Centigrade and Celsius -- originated in the 18th century, and were used interchangeably until the mid-20th century. Although some people might still use the term centigrade on occasion, the official term is Celsius. The names Celsius and centigrade date back to the scale’s two originators. In 1742, Swedish scientist Anders Celsius designed a temperature scale that used 0 degrees as the boiling point of water and 100 degrees as the freezing point. One year later, French scientist Jean Pierre Cristin designed a similar temperature scale: Cristin's scale used the same divisions as Celsius's scale, but Cristin’s scale set the freezing point at 0 degrees and the boiling point at 100 degrees. Cristin called his scale the centigrade scale, because it was divided into 100 parts, with centi as the prefix for 100. The Celsius/centigrade scale in use today is Cristin's, but it was interchangeably referred to as either Celsius or centigrade in different regions of the world.


Question: What proof do we have of Mole Theory?

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 What proof do we have of Mole Theory?

The same way we know that a dozen is 12. We made up the term mole. As for how we know how much a mole of something weighs, we know what 1 atoms weighs, and we know how many atoms are in a mole. If you want you can make up your own term and make it have 84 atoms


Question: Why do rollercoasters feel so fast, even if they’re going slower than we would normally drive?

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 Why do rollercoasters feel so fast, even if they’re going slower than we would normally drive?

The forces that you feel on the ride are less about the speed of the train and more about the acceleration forces of the short trip. Roller coasters typically don't travel in a straight line for long, and every turn, every hill, every drop, and every twist changes the direction and speed of acceleration on your body, causing you to feel like you are going faster and faster, as well as purposefully disorienting you.


Question: If neutrinos don't interact with anything, how can we detect them?

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 If neutrinos don't interact with anything, how can we detect them?

It's not that they DON'T interact, it's that they RARELY interact. Trillions of neutrinos are passing through your body, and maybe two might touch an atom in your body in your lifetime. Neutrino observatories don't really care where they're built since the Earth is pretty much transparent to neutrino radiation. First you build a giant chamber filled with many many tons of heavy water (it's an easy, stable, transparent liquid with density greater than regular water) and cover every inch of the insides with hypersensitive light sensors. Then you sit and wait, and hope that occasionally, maybe, every once and a while one of the sensors will pick up a faint flicker of a neutrino passing through the water and turning a neutron in the water into a proton. It's not much but its a start. Star Trek makes it seem like neutrons are as easy to see as heat.


Question: How do we perceive our inner monologue as actual sound?

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 How do we perceive our inner monologue as actual sound?

These questions are difficult to answer since we don't know a lot about the nature of the brain, but here is something to think about-- what is sound? If you're like most people, you probably think of sound as a series of vibrations that propagate through some medium and eventually hits your ears. But if I take an electrode and electrically stimulate your auditory cortex, you certainly hear "sounds"-- even though there are no vibrations hitting your ears. The takeaway is that your perception and your senses are fundamentally caused by activation of specific parts of your brain. It just so happens that for some reason, when you read to yourself in your head, you see activation in your auditory cortex. In other words, you can "hear" an imaginary voice because quite literally your brain is activating as if you had heard a real voice.


Question: How far out are flights planned at major airports and who is responsible for planning these flights and the gates at which they arrive? Are certain gates chosen for a reason or is it random?

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 How far out are flights planned at major airports and who is responsible for planning these flights and the gates at which they arrive? Are certain gates chosen for a reason or is it random?

All of this is handled by the airline. The airline plans the route (e.g. a flight from New York to Los Angeles and then back 2 times a week on Tuesday and Friday). The airline then assigns aircraft to that route (e.g. a Boeing 757). The airline then assigns a pilot to this route for some day, and the pilot files a flight plan with the FAA specifying the times of departure, way-points on the route, requested cruise altitude, etc. The pilot is also responsible for making sure the plane is fueled and safe for the flight. Gates at airports are almost always leased by the airline using them, and will usually be allocated in a single terminal. For example, Terminal 2 at JFK airport in NYC is leased entirely by Delta Airlines. Usually, gate assignments are planned well in advance, but sometimes (for more frequent flights, or due to delays) they're assigned upon arrival. ATC will direct the route the airplane is to take from the runway to the assigned gate (e.g. Taxi to gate A34 using taxiways A B2 B C6). The plane will then either be 'turned around' for another flight, or taken to a maintenance ramp/hangar.


Question: What exactly is "dx" in integrals and derivatives?

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 What exactly is "dx" in integrals and derivatives?

Intuitively, it's a very small change in x. The derivative (dy/dx) is a measure of how much a small change in x affects y. That's why it's written as a fraction of two very small numbers, dy and dx. The integral can be seen as a sum of areas of very thin rectangles. The height of each rectangle is the value of the function f(x), and the width is some small change in x, so we write it as Integral f(x) dx.


Question: How do whiteboards keep ink fresh?

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 How do whiteboards keep ink fresh?

The type of ink in the dry erase markers are formulated to sit on top of a surface. Also, the whiteboard itself is non-porous (doesn't absorb), or nearly so, so the ink just sits on top without sinking in. This is why you can get some staining on old whiteboards. The coating that makes them non-porous gets worn. Fun fact, you can use dry erase markers on any non-porous flat surface, and it'll wipe off the same.


Question: How do drawing salves work? Do they even?

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 How do drawing salves work? Do they even?

> But do they really do anything? How? Drawing salves have not been scientifically tested or approved for human use. That alone should be a huge alarm bell to you because if they were safe and effective the big medical companies would be selling the crap out of them. Heck, safe is enough for them to get into the game regardless of efficacy. "Drawing salves" sometimes *do* actually have an effect, typically through being corrosive. When placed on the skin they dissolve it which allows whatever you were attempting to "draw out" to escape as the barrier of skin between it is destroyed. This usually isn't a great idea to do though as it creates an avenue for infection and can result in very nasty scars. A particularly nasty version called "Black Salve" is often touted as a "natural alternative" to treatment of skin cancer and is responsible for some horrific mutilation of gullible users. In short whoever is advising the use of drawing salves is a crackpot touting alternative medicine (read as "scam medicine") and their advice should be disregarded.


Question: How do we learn about Planets and Stars really far away?

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 How do we learn about Planets and Stars really far away?

Hahaha. The funny thing about modern cosmology is that most of the field is theory. We are very sure that we are correct, but we are not certain, and there is a good chance we will not be certain in the near future. For example, we have no way of knowing 100% what happens in a supernova. We don't have the technology to be relatively close to one to see what happens, and even if we did, all the data collected would probably be destroyed in the explosion. We can only observe from a distance. We are very sure or nearly certain we are correct because we can use simulations and the fact that "nothing else explains the observations". Now, we know minute details about the planets in our solar system because we have telescopes and rovers that have been to said planets. (I don't think that's modern cosmology, perhaps planetary science.) For stars, what i said in the first paragraph applies. We've never been to another star, let alone inside one, so we can't be 100% sure. We can be 99% sure because "no other explanation explains the observations". Oh, and we have sent [rovers]( URL_0 ) to Titan, just in case you are wondering. So finally, to answer your question, generally you run simulations or you hypothesize (guess) until you have something that explains observations. Once you have only one hypothesis that explains the observations, you have the most probable answer. If you have any specific questions I can give what our top scientists currently think is the answer! :)


Question: Why is water discolored when they’re working on the lines but not normally?

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 Why is water discolored when they’re working on the lines but not normally?

You can replicate this effect at home. Just pick a faucet that you don't need daily, and then don't use it for a few months. When you first run it, you'll have that same "rusty" water. There is always a certain amount of rust and sediments in the water lines. But your normally functioning water system is a relatively stable and smooth flowing system. When they open up those huge lines to flush out fire hydrants though, you disturb that system quite a bit. The huge increase in water flow stirs up that sediment that normally happily sets at the bottom of your line, filling the water system with rust and debris.


Question: When you're hungry or thirsty, how does your body immediately know whether it's food or water you've just consumed?

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 When you're hungry or thirsty, how does your body immediately know whether it's food or water you've just consumed?

An organism, like a human, can be viewed as a complex machine full of receptors that takes stimuli from its environment, both external and internal. The human body has special receptors that can tell whether you drank some water or eaten some food. When you drink water, the salts in your body reduce their concentration (they get diluted), which sends a signal to the brain, telling "we just had some water, the thirst protocol is no longer required". When you consume food, there's a quick breakdown of the chemicals in it, specially for glucose. When the signal for "we just had some glucose" is sent to the brain, the "hunger protocol" is put on hold. The specifics of each one are quite complex and are beyond the scope of ELI5, if you want more information, try asking at /r/askscience!


Question: What's the difference in Trademark, Registered & copyright? And where is each one used?

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 What's the difference in Trademark, Registered & copyright? And where is each one used?

Trademark is the name of a business or product. If you open a business called Allinhumor's Tacos, that's your trademark. For a trademark, you have to use it first and then register it. A registered trademark is one that you filed a trademark application on and got it approved. Now nobody else can trademark Allinhumor's Tacos or anything confusingly similar to it. A copyright is automatic anytime you create an original work. A book, an email, a letter, a song, a painting. Nobody can copy it and redistribute it without your permission. If someone tries to do so, you need to register your copyright in order to sue them. Note that neither of these protect an idea. Someone else can write a story about a wizard going to boarding school as long as they don't use the name Harry Potter (trademarked) or copy any actual text from the J.K. Rowling books. Just rewording would still be a copyright violation, but telling a substantially similar story but completely in your own words would be legal.


Question: How does the human body know what to do with drugs invested through various ways?

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 How does the human body know what to do with drugs invested through various ways?

It doesn't know.. Pharmaceuticals are (usually) developed backwards- we find a chemical that does something interesting, say it inhibits a certain enzyme that we know is involved in pain transmission. From there it's a matter of scaling up and getting approval from the FDA to distribute your drug by proving it works. Some time later, we have a painkiller drug (aspirin, in the above example). Your body is a big system of chemical reactions and enzymes that you have no control over. When you take in a drug, your body will absorb and metabolize it automatically. The effects are determined by whatever that drug does chemically inside your body. The specific requirements for delivery (injection, pill, etc) are determined by the nature of the drug itself. Many can't survive a trip through your stomach, so they have to be injected. Others *must* be activated by going through the stomach, so it's really a consequence of the chemical nature/stability of the drug molecule and not something that can be controlled.


Question: Why do you get sick and throw up when taking antibiotics on a empty stomach?

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 Why do you get sick and throw up when taking antibiotics on a empty stomach?

Quite simply because the agent in the pool itself is irritating. Taking lots of medications can cause vomiting on an empty stomach because they boost acid production or irritate the stomach lining. It can also be you don't have enough juices in your stomach so the medicine is just gooping up in there. Eating allows the medicine to be diluted and absorbed easier. It either causes more acid production which dilutes the medicine or it helps soak up the created acid/irritating agents.


Question: What exactly have Man City done and haven’t Real/Barca/PSG been doing this for years?

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 What exactly have Man City done and haven’t Real/Barca/PSG been doing this for years?

The biggest thing is their parent company (essentially the royal family of Abu Dhabi) also owns some of their sponsors. The rules state there's a specific ratio of income to expenditures to be eligible to compete. Since the club and the sponsors are owned by the same people, the sponsors were paying heavily inflated sponsors fees as a way to inject cash into the club while looking like its coming from their sponsors. At its core, it's essentially money laundering to circumvent financial rules.


Question: What are practical applications for prime numbers?

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 What are practical applications for prime numbers?

Large prime numbers are essential to encryption, especially encrypted messages and information transmitted over the internet. Having two very large primes multiplied together is the basis of encryption keys. Computers struggle with prime factorization for very large numbers, and once those numbers reach a certain size, it takes even the most powerful computers years and years and years to work through a prime factorization algorithm in order to discover the basis of the encryption key being used.


Question: When adding bleach to fabric, what happens to the original fabric dye?

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 When adding bleach to fabric, what happens to the original fabric dye?

Bleach works to remove color from fabric because it is an oxidizing agent. The colors exist because certain molecules in whatever causes the color (fabric dye, grass stains) that are structured in a way that causes certain wavelengths to be absorbed, and others reflected, allowing us to perceive that color. When bleach interacts with these molecules, oxidation occurs. This changes the structure of those color molecules, causing them to become something different. Either they’re no longer color-producing molecules, or they no longer absorb any of the visible light, resulting in white. In short, bleach does indeed react with the dye, causing it to no longer be able to reflect color.


Question: Do animals other than humans repeat patterns mentally? e.g. getting a song stuck in one's head

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 Do animals other than humans repeat patterns mentally? e.g. getting a song stuck in one's head

It is very hard to say because we have not been able to ask the animals themselves. However we do see a lot of the same behavior patterns in animals as we do in humans. Especially in dogs which we do a lot of interaction with we can see things like obsessive compulsive disorders, depression, dementia and other mental ilnesses that we have in humans. So it is fair to assume that animals can also get songs and such stuck in their head just like humans.


Question: how exactly does pepto-bismol cure my nausea, heart burn, indigestion,upset stomach, diarrhea?

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 how exactly does pepto-bismol cure my nausea, heart burn, indigestion,upset stomach, diarrhea?

I am not a doctor or pharmacist, but someone who has taken lots of Pepto and has researched this out of curiosity. Basically, most of those symptoms are caused by an inflammation in the digestive tract. Bismuth Subsalicylate, the active ingredient, helps reduce that inflammation. I say most because as I understand it, we don't really know why it works as an anti-diarrheal. Usually diarrhea is caused by your system flooding your intestines with extra water to attempt to cleanse itself. So it could be the case that Pepto helps your intestinal wall reabsorb that extra fluid. [Source]( URL_0 )


Question: How come if a defendant sleeps with his defense lawyer a new lawyer must be found? (ex in text)

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 How come if a defendant sleeps with his defense lawyer a new lawyer must be found? (ex in text)

A lawyer is supposed to represent their client's *legal* best interests as best as they can. In order to do that, the lawyer has to be at least somewhat dispassionate about their client so that they don't get caught up in personal concerns. For instance, it may be better for a client to enter a plea deal rather than go to trial because the evidence against them is overwhelming, but a lawyer with a romantic interest in her client obviously doesn't want him in prison and may advise him to go to trial in the hope that he'll be found not guilty. It's also against the ethical rules of the American bar association so the lawyer would face accusations of professional misconduct, which means that they may have their license revoked and cannot properly represent their client.


Question: If paper is made of wood, how does it seem to burn at such a lower temperature than an actual piece of wood?

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 If paper is made of wood, how does it seem to burn at such a lower temperature than an actual piece of wood?

I think it has to do with surface area versus volume. With a large surface area like a sheet of paper, it's relatively easy to heat part of it up to the temperature where it will burn, but when you're trying to burn a piece of wood, any heat you put in one part of the surface gets "soaked up" by all of the wood inside, making it take much more energy to get it burning, even if the ignition temperature is the same.


Question: How did people sync their clocks / know what time it was (say, 1875) when things like catching a train required you to know the exact time?

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 How did people sync their clocks / know what time it was (say, 1875) when things like catching a train required you to know the exact time?

People would just plan to arrive early enough at the train station, synchronize with the grand central clock, then run some errands, patronize the numerous cafés, bars and restaurants on the other side of the street ... Actually not that different from us, we may know exactly when a plane will take off, but not exactly how much time we need to go through check-in and security, so we arrive early at the airport. The real issue was synchronizing clocks between stations and be able to know when a train will arrive. A lot of people came with many ideas to solve this increasingly crucial issue at the beginning of the 20th century. A guy working at the Bern patent office reviewed a lot of those and, probably out of boredom, end up proving that this is not possible ! (just speaking of the most general case, of course). His name was Albert Einstein.


Question: How exactly does the feeling of your heart "fluttering" in your chest happen when you think about someone you like or love?

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 How exactly does the feeling of your heart "fluttering" in your chest happen when you think about someone you like or love?

To put it in very simple terms: the things that you think of and emotions that you feel can have physical effects on your body. Its just like how your hands might shake when you get scared or angry and how your cheeks may turn red when you’re embarrassed. When you think of somebody you’re fond of you may get anxious or excited. When you have these different emotions your brain will release chemicals that are related to these emotions which will cause other parts of your brain to respond, like the area that’s responsible for heart rate. The part of your brain that control your heart rate and other basic functions isn’t able to reason out WHY you’re feeling excited or anxious because it’s one the most basic parts of your brain and it doesn’t do very much “thinking” at all. It just receives the message that you are excited and so your heart rate will rapidly increase. In fact, your body’s “built in” control mechanisms are constantly adjusting things like heart rate and breathing for a large variety of things you may not even be conscious of. The reason your body reacts the way it does to these certain emotions can be instinctual or learned. Another example: Your heart races when you’re scared because your brain is basically telling your body “get ready to run or fight!!!” Even though you may just be sitting on the couch watching a horror movie. It’s just the same. The heart rate part of the brain doesn’t know you’re watching a movie. All it knows is that you’re scared so it adjusts accordingly. Source: Degree in BioMedical Sciences


Question: What is fuzzy logic and how is it that it's found in missiles and rice cookers?

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 What is fuzzy logic and how is it that it's found in missiles and rice cookers?

Traditional logic only knows two states: True or False. Is the rice cooker hot enough? If yes, turn off the heating element, and if not, turn it on. Fuzzy logic can also express to what extent a statement is true on a sliding scale. Is the rice cooker hot enough? No, but it's close, so turn down the heating element a bit. In a lot of control systems that extra information can be beneficial because it allows the control logic to make better decisions. In the rice cooker for example the heating element has a certain amount of thermal mass, and even if you turn it off, it will remain hot for a few moments and continue to heat the rice even without power going to it. That means you will overshoot the desired temperature by a bit if you keep it powered at 100% until you reach the target temperature. And if you keep it at 0% until the temperature falls below the target, the heating element will need a few moments to heat up when you do turn it on, so there's going to be undershoot as well. So instead of maintaining a constant 60°C to keep the rice warm, the actual temperature may oscillate between 57°C and 63°C. If the controller is smart enough to reduce the output of the heating element when it approaches the target temperature, there's not going to be as much overshoot.


Question: How is machine learning different from a statistical model?

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 How is machine learning different from a statistical model?

Machine learning is a way to build a statistical model. It is all well and good to say "let's use a statistical model!", but you still have to decide which one to use and how to implement it. Is your data distribution linear? Geometric? Logarithmic? Sinusoidal? You have to start making guesses and see which one you think fits the best. Machine learning automates that process, building a statistical model based on the data itself.


Question: Why aren't there 100 seconds in a minute and 100 minutes in an hour?

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 Why aren't there 100 seconds in a minute and 100 minutes in an hour?

THE DIVISION of the hour into 60 minutes and of the minute into 60 seconds comes from the Babylonians who used a sexagesimal (counting in 60s) system for mathematics and astronomy. They derived their number system from the Sumerians who were using it as early as 3500 BC. The use of 12 subdivisions for day and night, with 60 for hours and minutes, turns out to be much more useful than (say) 10 and 100 if you want to avoid having to use complicated notations for parts of a day. Twelve is divisible by two, three, four, six and 12 itself - whereas 10 has only three divisers - whole numbers that divide it a whole number of times. Sixty has 12 divisers and because 60 = 5 x 12 it combines the advantages of both 10 and 12. In fact both 12 and 60 share the property that they have more divisers than any number smaller than themselves. This doesn't, of course, explain how this system spread throughout the world. Phil Molyneux, London W2. (Search the world wide web next time, found this in no time)


Question: Why does it seem like only a few mobile games appear in almost all mobile game ads ?

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 Why does it seem like only a few mobile games appear in almost all mobile game ads ?

There's actually several factors: 1 Remarketing, 2 Look-alike targeting, 3 Profile targeting 1. In remarketing if you ever demonstrate a whisper of interest in a product they will seize upon that and bend the powers of targeted advertising towards prolonged exposure. This is most common and annoying when you sign up for or buy something you want then see ads for it everywhere. Lazy remarketing flagged you as a hot lead without also tagging you as a customer. Yes Amazon, I did just buy one of those thanks for reminding me. 2. Look-alike targeting is where that magic happens that makes you SURE, JUST SURE that Facebook and Google are listening to you through your microphone. It actually takes two forms. The first form is a super secret black box that Facebook feeds data into, it compares you with millions of other people and figure out people who browse and shop like you do. So it someone already identified as like-you starts playing X game, they will start targeting you as a look alike. The other aspect is proximity. If it geolocates you with a friend, it will assume you will talk about things. So for example when I saw a guy I hadn't seen in a while and he said his son started karate lessons, wouldn't you know it I started seeing karate ads even though I never looked it up once. They assumed right we'd talk about it. Creepy. Yeah. 3. Profile targeting is kind of old fashioned but say an advertiser says they want someone who follows the EA Sports Facebook page AND college football teams. You'll be targeted by that advertiser more than advertisers who just say college football teams because you're a more specific match.


Question: Why is water an essential part of life?

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 Why is water an essential part of life?

The chemical processes that determine life as we understand and define it require water. It's possible there are life forms out there that do not require water- but we have no evidence of it. As far as we know- every living thing dies if cut off from H2O for a long enough period.


Question: why do so many lottery winners go broke within a year?

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 why do so many lottery winners go broke within a year?

A few years ago /u/blakeclass wrote a [response to a thread]( URL_0 ) that stared off: > Congratulations! You just won millions of dollars in the lottery! That's great. > Now you're fucked. > No really. > You are. > You're fucked. Ignoring the non-monetary things that can happen, the example of Jack Whittaker is quite an illustrative one. He won $315 million ($114 mil after choosing the lump sum + paying tax), but even before then he had a net worth of $15mil and was the owner of a successful contracting firm. Surely someone whose net worth is *that much* knows how to budget, right? Sure. So long as you ignore all the pleading - I've got MS, my daughter's got cancer, I'm unemployed and just need a jumpstart with money. Not just in letters, but in person. Whittaker abandoned going to his usual breakfast place because he would always be accosted. Then they showed up at his door, and he had to hire security personel. And that was just the start. Imagine having your face, name, and location posted in the news. Anyone with a bit of sleuthing could find your home and start tracking or stalking you. Extended family (some of whom you've not heard of in years, if not *decades*) could come out of the woodwork wanting to share in your fortune. People accosting close family members because they're easier to get to than you, or breaking into your house to steal goods or cash. Anyone who is aware of your fortune is almost inevitably going to want money. And either you hire a go-between to deal with it (money), you have a stone cold heart and can say no a hundred times a day, or you give to those you believe are 'needy' and watch more people come and ask while your fortune is whittled away. Then, of course, you've got the people who have no idea how to manage money. Two, three, five million? More than they could ever hoped to imagine. They can buy a fancy house, a nice car, maybe a luxury yaht...but where's all the money to *maintain* that going to come from? A luxury holiday in a five-star hotel with first class flight tickets sounds great, but four years later you're back to your old habit of camping because all the money is *gone*. If you're also one of the demographic that doesn't earn that much money, you might not have any idea that there are people whose *entire job* is managing rich peoples' money. So they make spur of the moment financial decisions that inevitably lead to a short-term extravagant lifestyle, followed by bankrupcy.


Question: Why is it that when people watch you do something you are good at, your performance level decreases?

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 Why is it that when people watch you do something you are good at, your performance level decreases?

This is a situational thing and I’ll occasionally see the opposite effect. Part of it is you being nervous about messing up makes you lose focus on the task, and if you are nervous enough for adrenaline your hands might shake and lose some precision. Part of it may be you just got unlucky that time and blame it on the people watching. This could be a conservatism bias where you only remember the memorable events.


Question: - What is the difference between interferometry and spectrometry?

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 - What is the difference between interferometry and spectrometry?

Interferometry uses light overlapping with itself, but with different offsets to measure distances. Light is a wave and so if peaks line up with peaks you see brighter light. If peaks match up with troughs then everything cancel out and you see no light. If you can create a physical setup, where one ray of light has to travel slightly longer or slower compared to the other, so that it is offset, then you will be able to see a change in brightness at the end. If, as you change your parameters, the light gets bright and then dark again x times, then you know that the offset between the waves now is x wavelengths long. Since you can pick light with very small wavelengths, this allows for incredibly accurate measurements of distance, wavelength, etc. Edit: anything wave-like can be used for interferometry. For example, since neutrons can act like a wave, you can have neutrons interfere with themselves as they travel through a crystal, which gives you information about the structure of the crystal. Spectrometry is about measuring spectra. Spectra, in the classical sense are about seeing how much light you get at different wavelengths/colors. This works by separating light of different wavelengths/colors out (think rainbow) and then looking at each color and seeing how bright it is. Plot color vs brightness and you get a spectrum! In truth spectrometry is much broader than this though. Brightness is really just telling you something about the proportions of photons with a given wavelength. And so in general anything where you’re measuring a distribution of something like wavelength or frequency or energy would be considered part of spectrometry.


Question: Torrents. Could studios sabotage them if they actually wanted to?

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 Torrents. Could studios sabotage them if they actually wanted to?

They do try to overload a torrent with clients that you can't really connect to. I forget the term for it, flooding maybe, but essentially it stops people from downloading or reduces speed to a crawl. They can also submit bad files to the major sites so that people searching for a torrent may end up picking a bad torrent instead of a real one. You wouldn't realize it was bad until it had finished downloading. However these methods are pretty ineffective. Major sites have uploader rankings, torrent ratings and comments systems and probably also actively block bad content so it's fairly easy for the "legit" version to surface. If flooding is severe then people end up resubmitting the file under different names to create paths that aren't being poisoned, and its difficult for the company orchestrating the attacks to adapt to cover them all.


Question: Exactly why do we have the concept of imaginary numbers?

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 Exactly why do we have the concept of imaginary numbers?

For a roughly analogous reason to why we have negative numbers. Addition has this nice property where if you add any two positive numbers, the number you get back is guaranteed to be positive too. We say that the positive numbers are 'closed under addition'. There's no way, via addition, to get from inside the positives to outside of them. But we do not have closure under subtraction. If you only know about positive numbers, then some subtractions simply cannot be done. So, we invent negative numbers, and negative numbers are "the closure under subtraction" of the positives. A similar thing happened with division and fractions. Integers have the property of closure under multiplication - if you multiply any two integers, you're guaranteed to get another integer. But division does not give the same guarantee! If p is not divisible by q, then the fraction p/q is not an integer. So we invented rational numbers. Rational numbers are "the closure under division" of the integers. In the same way, complex numbers are the "closure" of real numbers under fractional exponentiations such as square-roots. Whenever we encounter one of those operations that seemingly can't be done, we ask, "well, what if it *could*? Let's just assume that the result of this forbidden operation is x" and see if that assumption leads us into any contradictions, or if it turns out that x behaves consistently, and can be treated as a normal algebraic term without everything blowing up. If it all still makes sense, then we've invented new math. Sometimes, though, it doesn't make sense. Division by zero is also a 'forbidden operation', but when we try doing it anyway and just assume there's some number x which is equal to 1/0, this quickly leads us into contradictions, where we can "prove" falsehoods like 1=2.


Question: As someone with no knowledge of U.S. politics, why is it that with an annual Marijuana related deaths of 0, and an annual Alcohol related deaths of 50,000+ in the U.S. alone, is there so little effort made to reduce alcohol usage and some much effort to criminalize Marijuana?

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 As someone with no knowledge of U.S. politics, why is it that with an annual Marijuana related deaths of 0, and an annual Alcohol related deaths of 50,000+ in the U.S. alone, is there so little effort made to reduce alcohol usage and some much effort to criminalize Marijuana?

In the past, the people who were deciding what should be legal and illegal were people who liked alcohol and didn't like marijuana. Now, people are making a lot of money selling alcohol so they don't want it to become illegal. People aren't making so much money selling marijuana, so they don't care if it remains illegal.


Question: How do venomous snakes avoid self-envenomation?

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 How do venomous snakes avoid self-envenomation?

They actually are susceptible! There's two things to consider. 1 - They swallow their own venom and 2. They accidentally bite themselves and inject their own venom. If they were to swallow their own venom, no harm is done as the venom is made of protein which gets destroyed by the juices in the digestive tract. The other question is what if a snake accidentally bit itself or if another snake bit it? If venom is injected into their system (including their own) they can be susceptible to it, but some scientists have also found anti-venom inside snakes. They can develop their own anti-venoms (antibodies) to their own venom, but we don't quite yet know how that happens. It could be that they have a low level of exposure possibly from accidentally biting themselves occasionally. Similar with spiders and other venomous and poisonous animals. A female spider can bite the male and kill the male with their venom. The same can be true for snakes because these venoms are proteins that have been injected into the body.


Question: If even a small nuclear exchange (say, India vs Pakistan) is enough to put the entire world in a nuclear winter, why did the 2,000+ nuclear tests conducted from the 1940s-60s not create a nuclear winter?

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 If even a small nuclear exchange (say, India vs Pakistan) is enough to put the entire world in a nuclear winter, why did the 2,000+ nuclear tests conducted from the 1940s-60s not create a nuclear winter?

The cause of nuclear winter is not because of the nuclear weapons, but because of the massive firestorms nuclear weapons will cause. Firestorms are absurdly destructive, and send everything they burn into the atmosphere. When you're just detonating the things high in the atmosphere, in deserts or underwater, there's really no chance of that happening. But in a war, you're going after places that are very vulnerable to firestorms. So much soot at once injected into the atmosphere can cause enough of a change to set off a nuclear winter. A single volcano can cause the same effects, and the amount of soot released from a nuclear conflict would be way more than a volcano gives off.


Question: What are you actually doing when you take the derivative of a function and why does it give the area? What about integration?

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 What are you actually doing when you take the derivative of a function and why does it give the area? What about integration?

Taking the derivative gives you the gradient (steepness) of the function, and for y=function of x, the derivative tells you how quickly y changes with respect to x. Integration gives you the area under a line, and essentially just reverses the derivative process. If you integrate a derivative you get the original function. Integrating a line gives the area as you're multiplying each y value (the distance from the axis to the line) by a very small X value (dx, which is really just a way of saying an infinitely small change in X) which is another distance, and then adding them all up, and since distance*distance=area, you get a value for the area under the line


Question: Why does the frosting on a donut melt and absorb in as the donut goes stale?

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 Why does the frosting on a donut melt and absorb in as the donut goes stale?

It isn't separation - it is absorbing water vapor from the air. The frosting is really just a high sugar content syrup that has cooled and hardened on the donut; sugar is very hydrophilic, so it will absorb water very easily. As time passes, it absorbs water out of the air itself, which makes the hardened frosting more liquid.