Question: Why do we have to fry onions first when cooking? What makes them stay crunchy if you add them later?

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 Why do we have to fry onions first when cooking? What makes them stay crunchy if you add them later?

The main reason is that the starches in plant food, namely pectin, take a while to break down in normal cooking temperatures. When you fry an onion with high heat or just cook it long enough, the pectin which holds the cells of the plant together starts to fall apart, making the texture softer. The high heat of frying is also good because it can caramelize the starches in the plant, making a nice flavor.


Question: Why won’t we just start colonizing the moon? Is it because we don’t have good enough tech or cause it’s pointless?

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 Why won’t we just start colonizing the moon? Is it because we don’t have good enough tech or cause it’s pointless?

There's the whole lack of an atmosphere thing. This means you'd have to live, work, play, etc inside of buildings. The entire liveable environment would be inside. Water, air, etc would need to be transported there. Any damage to the structure, say from a meteorite, would be potentially fatal to everyone in that structure. Now let's look at the ISS. That thing is barely in space and so far it's cost over $US150b. And it's tiny. Not exactly the size of something that you'd need on the Moon to support a colony. And then there's getting the people there. So far the biggest spacecraft ever built to get people to the Moon could ship over 2 at a time. Granted, that was about 50 years ago so maybe they could build one that could ship over like 4 now?


Question: Why is Russia not so rich?

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 Why is Russia not so rich?

A very large part of it is that while Russia is geographically very huge, it does not actually have that large of a population. That is the main reason its overall GDP is so far behind the United States. Also at issue is mismanagement. Almost everybody is in agreement that Russia currently is run by a small handful of oligarchs that are only looking out for their own interests.


Question: If you order a drink with no ice, do you get a noticeable amount of more drink? Why or why not?

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 If you order a drink with no ice, do you get a noticeable amount of more drink? Why or why not?

The answer is going to depend largely on the venue where you buy your drink. In a bar, quantities for each ingredient in a cocktail are precisely measured and the dilution produced by melting ice in the cocktail's recipe account for some of the volume of the final drink. Thus, if you ask for a cocktail that is normally served with ice with no ice, you'll get a smaller drink in size, but the same amount of alcohol overall. In a fast-food restaurant, asking for a drink with no ice will result in your getting a larger quantity of whatever you ordered to drink as most restaurants use a gun or dispenser to serve soft drinks. In places that serve soft drinks by the bottle, you'll get whatever the bottle you paid for contains, regardless of whether ice is in the glass or not.


Question: How can some coastal cities (eg Los Angeles, Perth) have a dry climate but other coastal cities (eg Miami, Sydney) be humid?

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 How can some coastal cities (eg Los Angeles, Perth) have a dry climate but other coastal cities (eg Miami, Sydney) be humid?

There are a ton of differences between these areas that all have an influence on the climate. For instance, the water temperature in the Pacific is lower than in the Atlantic. There are also different pressure systems near the surface of the water and different air streams that flow differently to push the water around.


Question: What are intrusive thoughts, and what causes them to happen?

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 What are intrusive thoughts, and what causes them to happen?

This one is hard to explain simply. A well known example is called The Call of the Void, and it's where just absolutely randomly, for no reason you'll imagine yourself or feel the urge to veer off the road into a tree, or jump off a high building, or throw yourself into traffic. Intrusive thoughts are like that, they're created and imprinted into your consciousness by your subconscious mind. They're not limited to this but it's a good example.


Question: How do bomb disposal teams decide which wire to cut on a bomb and how do they pinpoint where a bomb is?

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 How do bomb disposal teams decide which wire to cut on a bomb and how do they pinpoint where a bomb is?

Ninety percent of the time, they find a bomb the same way non-explosive-ordnance-disposal (EOD) guys do - someone sees a loose piece of trash that seems suspicious, someone just *said* something to a passing patrol, or there are signs that something's been buried - loose dirt, suspicious tracks, etc. Often, there are only so many places to put an explosive in such a way that they'll be useful - along convoy routes, in areas where troops are passing by somewhat regularly, etc., and so, upon approaching this sort of an area, the guys trying not to get blown up are going to be eyeing every dead animal, trash pile, upturned patch of dirt, and so on with extra wariness. In some of the less hospitable portions of the Middle East especially, the bomb isn't on a timer like you'd see in a Bond film - a lot of times it's just an old land mine someone found in an old Soviet dump, which has its own set of drawbacks - maybe it needs a certain amount of pressure, maybe it's unreliable and corroded, maybe it's only going to go off if something large and metal drives over it - or there's a simple circuit connected to an antenna. The latter are more common then you'd think, and they require someone watching the bomb's location with a cell phone to actually detonate. So if a patrol sees someone eyeing the area who's not got a good reason already to be doing so... well, see above: it's a pretty good indicator. And most of the time, there's no particular rush after the thing's been spotted - the troops are pulled back, civilians are warned off the area, and people are posted at a safe distance to redirect traffic. There's no sense risking someone - a very well-trained and in-demand someone, to boot - to go in and cut wires and the like. Nine times out of ten, it's a simple matter of just blowing the thing from a safe distance - send a little robot in to place a charge and press the button when it wheels merrily away, toss an explosive on top of it and light the fuse, and so on. These aren't bombs in the sense of old WWII bunker-busters; if you know it's there, it's just easier, faster and safer to get anyone and anything out of the likely blast radius, back up a little more, and blow the thing up - most likely, it won't have an effective casualty radius of more than few meters anyway, and the end result is just a hole in the road and the EOD guys waddling away to their next date with destiny.


Question: If almost all counties in the world have an external debt towards another country, couldn't the debt be paid only "on paper", thus getting rid of it?

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 If almost all counties in the world have an external debt towards another country, couldn't the debt be paid only "on paper", thus getting rid of it?

In reality, they've issued bond with different maturity dates. So one debt might be payable 30 years from now, another debt only 10 years. They're denominated in different currencies. And governments don't just owe each other, but private investors (like individuals, pension funds or businesses) or international organizations (like the World Bank) as well. Because the real situation is so much more complicated, it takes a lot of diplomacy to get multiple countries to agree to restructure debt in this way. It usually only happens when there is a crisis, and restructuring the debt is preferable to it not being paid at all. This is what happened with the Greek government's debt for example. It's more common for bilateral measures to be taken--like when a rich country forgives a debt that a poor country owes, as a type of foreign aid.


Question: If our skin is porous why do we not fill up with water while swimming?

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 If our skin is porous why do we not fill up with water while swimming?

A few reasons. Firstly is that your body is already full of water and organs that ar denser than water. So there isn't room to fill. Secondly is that skin is porous, but the holes don't go all the way through to the muscle etc. Pores only go through the first part of skin. Lastly, pores expand and contract due to outside stimulus. Hot and cold etc. When submerged the body recognizes the external pressure and keeps them closed. That's why you don't sweat while swimming in the way you do while running.


Question: Why do eggs become shelf-stable when they're cooked in baked goods like bread, but have to be refrigerated if they're cooked in an omelet or scrambled?

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 Why do eggs become shelf-stable when they're cooked in baked goods like bread, but have to be refrigerated if they're cooked in an omelet or scrambled?

The dangers of eggs is that it may get higher levels of salmonella. This can first happen once the shell of the egg is washed or cracked. But refrigeration slows down the salmonella allowing washed eggs to be stored for longer. And even though you have heated the eggs when cooking it it may get reinfected with salmonella so you still need to refrigerate it. However in a typical baked cake or cookie the conditions are very different from the conditions in an egg. It is usually much dryer and there are much less protein then in egg products. This means that salmonella have a much harder time infecting cakes and cookies then omelet or scrambled eggs. It does not mean you should not refrigerate them as there are also other types of infections they may get but it is not as important.


Question: Why do human babies cry so loudly and so often? It seems like a detrimental action that would be selected out. Loud wailing could put the baby and it's caregivers in danger.

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 Why do human babies cry so loudly and so often? It seems like a detrimental action that would be selected out. Loud wailing could put the baby and it's caregivers in danger.

Human babies are the most helpless babies in the animal kingdom. They're utterly unable to fend for themselves. They can't walk, they can't grasp anything, they can't even hold their own heads up. Other animals give birth and within minutes their babies are walking around and exploring, but human babies are born very undeveloped. Most mammals, the babies can just walk up to the mom's nipple and start nursing. But human babies can't do anything for themselves, they can't even approach the nipple on their own. They need their mother to pick them up, and hold their face directly to the nipple. But how do you let Mom know you're hungry? Well you get her attention in the most unmistakable way possible: crying. And babies' cries were specifically evolved to be the most annoying sound possible, something we absolutely cannot ignore or tune out. When babies cry, they get their mom's attention, and she breastfeeds them. You are correct, this is not necessarily an evolutionarily advantageous behavior, the loud noise would alert predators. But humans are themselves predators. In fact we're *apex* predators. No animal routinely hunts humans for food, we're top of the food chain in every ecosystem on Earth. This isn't to say no animal ever kills humans. Some animals do on occasion. But no animal *makes a habit* of it. If they did, we'd kill them all. The reason we can afford to have really annoying babies attracting attention is that humans developed a very specific evolutionary strategy: we're the most cooperative vertebrate species on Earth. We evolved to be very intelligent and to cooperate on a massive and permanent scale. No other veretbrate has permanent social groups anywhere close to the size of human ones. Part of this has to do with our walking on two legs. Walking on two legs is a great thing, it frees up two of your limbs to do other things besides walk. This is why we evolved to be so crafty and resourceful: we've got two hands to do whatever we want with. But there's a tradeoff. When you walk on two legs, your pelvis has to narrow. And a narrow pelvis is hard to give birth through. It can only give birth to small babies, small enough to fit through the pelvis. So human babies are therefore born "premature" essentially. They're not even close to fully-developed and they need a lot of time outside the womb before they can even walk and chew food, let alone fend for themselves. Normally this would be an evolutionary disadvantage, to give birth to helpless babies that need protection and constant attention. But humans are so dominant, we have no predators, so we can afford to give birth to such useless babies.


Question: why are cameras fooled by superior mirages?

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 why are cameras fooled by superior mirages?

Light hits a camera sensor the same way that light hits an eyeball. Neither your brain nor the camera are "fooled"; they're both showing you a picture based on the light that hits them. If the light being detected by both of them is bent the same way, then they'll both end up with the same distorted image.


Question: FCC Comments. How many are needed and how do they make a difference in policy?

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 FCC Comments. How many are needed and how do they make a difference in policy?

The SOPA debate led to over 500k comments on the FCC. Less than a year later, the initial mainstream net neutrality debate that followed led to over 1M comments on the FCC. So, to answer your question - historically it seems that you need roughly 500k comments to delay policy change for another year. The question is, how many do you have to hit in order to actually cement net neutrality as policy. As that number is purely hypothetical, let's just say that as long as there's a monopoly on ISPs being privately opposed to publicly run, the answer is: infinite comments.


Question: What is Backward Telescoping Effect?

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 What is Backward Telescoping Effect?

I would say if the memories are all set in the same location, and perhaps involved all the same people, then the memories might get melded together. For example, say you had a meeting at work with your boss last year concerning a particular project. Every week you have had this meeting to discuss the status of the project's progress. Perhaps one week you discuss this part and next week another part. For a year now you've been having weekly meetings about the project. When he brings up a particular part of the project, you might ask, "Didn't we just discuss this last week/month/x months ago?" He'll either say "No," or else he may be just as puzzled as you are.


Question: What exactly is shame? How do one experience it?

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 What exactly is shame? How do one experience it?

Kursgesagt on youtube did an excellent video on Loneliness that explained. Shame is an evolutionary driver of social behaviour, and being social means humans are more likely to survive as we used to watch out for predators and help feed one another. Doing something that doesn't match with what society might expect, that we know is wrong, makes us feel shame, which we find uncomfortable, so we don't do it again and we don't end up being removed from our peers.


Question: If supermarkets have a defined science/art as to where products are located, why are they all different?

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 If supermarkets have a defined science/art as to where products are located, why are they all different?

Numerous factors- 1 Store size. Different stores are different sizes, and shapes depending on the area they are situated and the availble space/ planned market.. What works for one floor plan doesn't neccesarily work for another. 2 customers. Customers in different areas like different things, so different branches carry different products, and or different stock levels. This means certain types of product need more space in some stores then others. 3 There's more then one possible arrangement that works well. 4 They do tend to have LOTS of things in common. Walk into any supermarket. Fresh Fruit and Veg is almost always the first thing you come to. Dairy products are always kept together. Dental and medical supplies are in the same isle, sweets biscuits and crisps are next to one another. And so on.


Question: Why do cities and towns "stagger" stoplights so that no matter your timing you'll always be caught at a light?

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</answer>
 Why do cities and towns "stagger" stoplights so that no matter your timing you'll always be caught at a light?

Background: Served on Transportation and Infrastructure Committee for a major Canadian city. Involved in design/implementation of roadworks, including intelligent stoplight systems. Some background on stoplights: There are multiple kinds of stoplights, the most basic just running on a simple timer-based system. Every so many seconds, the lights change, but there is no awareness of the traffic conditions. Some more advanced stoplights contain vehicle sensors embedded in the roadway at or before the stop line. These sensors feed information into the light control system, allowing it to make intelligent decisions. For instance, if you have a minor road intersecting a major road, there may be sensors placed on the minor road, so that the lights only cycle when there is a car waiting to cross. Sometimes they are used to signal a preemptive left turn light. The civil engineers will space out two sensors 4-5 car lengths apart, and if both sensors are covered it means there are at least that many cars queuing, and the advance left will allow those cars to proceed first. Most major intersections have at least a few roadway sensors. The most advanced systems allow the lights to communicate and can be timed to allow waves of traffic. In my city, there is an Intersection Control Centre, with live feeds from cameras at each intersection, and the ability to adjust intersection timings on the fly. Priority routes are identified, along with traffic flows during certain times of the day. The stoplights along these priority routes are then synchronized, taking into account the relative speed of the traffic and the speed limits. If you're going with the priority flow of traffic, you'll hit at most one red light, after which point you'll be synchronized with the traffic flow, and you should hit all greens, as long as you drive the speed limit. If you drive too fast, you'll hit each red just as it turns green. If you're hitting all the reds, you might be going in the wrong direction, or you're just really unlucky. I highly doubt that your city is specifically engineering the light cycles to slow you down. If anything, they'd be aiming to speed you up. EDIT: So this blew up overnight. I'll try to answer a bunch of questions that people have had. I'm not an industry professional, I've just been in the scene with them for awhile. I work in IT, not traffic engineering. 0. There's no big "Traffic Engineering" bible that every engineer uses. Different cities can do wildly different things, and all we can do is speculate. There's no way to answer "My road is optimized for exactly 42mph at 11am, why is that?" 1. People are really good at finding patterns where there aren't any. Conspiracy theorists abound! If the lights in your city are messing with you, they probably aren't. Having said that, weirder things have happened. *shrug* It's certainly possible for clever engineers to slow traffic down or to speed traffic up. I'd bet dollars to donuts that they do this in Vegas, as many people have mentioned. A few people have also mentioned that the lights are used to prevent speeders, another plausible possibility. It really depends on your city and the engineers. 2. "aiming to speed you up" is meant within reason. I'm talking about a jam packed 6 lane road where coordinated light cycles can mean the difference between 40km/h and 50km/h. At night, the lights probably ARE optimized to dissuade people from speeding/racing. 3. Buses and emergency services usually have preemtion devices to allow them to hold a green or switch to a green (usually respectively. I know that buses where I live aren't able to force a red to a green, but fire trucks can) 4. The roadway sensors use magnetic induction to detect when a large chunk of metal is above them, e.g. your car. It's not by weight or pressure, you don't need to hit them exactly or run them over, you just need to get your car near them. The preemption devices mentioned above use special strobe lights (or wireless in higher-tech systems), so flashing your high beams probably isn't gonna do dick, unless you can flash your high beams 20 times per second.


Question: Why is aerosol spray terrible for the environment?

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 Why is aerosol spray terrible for the environment?

Aerosols used to use Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as a propellant. Essentially a compressed gas that is used to force the material out of the can when you open the nozzle. CFCs were found to be the direct cause of Ozone depletion. CFCs would enter the high atmosphere and react with Ozone (O3) destroying the Ozone layer and letting harmful UV rays in. Once this was understood CFCs were eventually banned and the Ozone layer is slowly rebuilding itself. CFCs are still used today but in tiny amounts compared to previous decades. Today Aerosols use gases like propane as a propellant. Propane doesn't have the same negative effect on the ozone layer as CFCs but it's flammable and a fossil fuel which causes its own problems.


Question: What is the difference between well made plastics and ones that break easily?

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 What is the difference between well made plastics and ones that break easily?

Picking the right plastic for the job (there's tons of types), spending the extra money to add in glass-fiber reinforcement (if you look on the inside of a drill clamshell where it says like PA6 GF20 that means it's 20% glass fiber), engineering the design to be of a proper thickness and have good reinforcement, having the right mix and settings for the melt/extrusion. A lot of stuff can make the difference. Most of it is related to, no surprise, being willing to spend the money.


Question: - How do those labour simulators work, and are they safe?

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 - How do those labour simulators work, and are they safe?

So a labor simulator uses electric pads that are placed over specific abdominal muscles. When activated, they send an electric signal to the muscle causing the muscle to contract in much the same way that your brain sends an electric signal to your muscles. To simulate labor, the machine causes the muscles to react in the same way that they would during a contraction. They are safe, though they would make you sore for a few days after. I wouldn't reccomend it because first, contractions fucking hurt (can't move, can't breathe kind of hurt) and second, they aren't a fully realistic representation of labor anyways.


Question: - Why do we notice a misspelling AFTER sending a text and not before, even when we proofread it once or twice?

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 - Why do we notice a misspelling AFTER sending a text and not before, even when we proofread it once or twice?

I have noticed that while in the program I'm using (email, text, word, whatever) if I look at it too long, my brain anticipates what is expected but not what's actually there. If I copy it into a different program, or change the font style or color, my brain thinks it's something new and I can pick up the mistakes. Usually, the screen you type in looks different than the screen you view in, so once you've sent it and look again, your brain is seeing it "fresh".


Question: Whats the difference between a psychiatrist, psychologist, and a therapist?

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 Whats the difference between a psychiatrist, psychologist, and a therapist?

Psychiatrist: a doctor, who went through med school, who prescribes psychiatric meds. Occasionally also provides therapy. Psychologist: person with doctorate level education (PhD) but not medical doctor. Can do a range of jobs: be a therapist, do psych testing, consult for many fields, etc. In USA- school psychologists just need Masters degree, but any other psychologist is PhD. Therapist: person who delivers therapy, usually referring to talk therapy. Can have a range of qualifications, like: usually a masters degree (at minimum) may be LCSW/LICSW, LMHC, LMFT, psychologist, etc. Generally does not prescribe meds unless they are also a nurse practitioner or psychiatrist. Note: there are other therapists, like occupational/speech/behavior but you usually hear the word in front of therapist in that case.


Question: How can someone sound awful when trying to sing, but when they talk, it never sounds bad?

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 How can someone sound awful when trying to sing, but when they talk, it never sounds bad?

Talking is not a thing where precise frequences are important. You can say the word "apricot" in a basso, baritone, tenor, contralto or soprano, it will still be "apricot" and nothing else. When you sing, however, you have to maintain the exact correct frequency, if you miss it, you will sing the wrong note. Music is mostly mathematical relationships between frequencies: consonant notes are frequencies with simple ratios, dissonant notes have big ugly fractions or even irrational numbers as ratios. You sing two notes and accidentally hit sqrt of two - the tritone instead of one and a half - a perfect fifth, and what was intended to be a consonance sounds like a painful dissonance.


Question: Why frozen food smells way less, almost nothing, than when at ambient temperature?

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 Why frozen food smells way less, almost nothing, than when at ambient temperature?

A lower temperature means molecules have less energy and are moving less. When you smell things, that's molecules of those things getting into your nose and attaching to smell receptors. So when something is frozen, those molecules aren't moving around much and not many of them are getting into your nose. When it warms up, those molecules are moving more so more of them make their way into your nose, so you smell it more.


Question: Why does soap feel slippery?

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 Why does soap feel slippery?

I guess I can try to answer my own question... Lubrication happens when there is a film of liquid separating two surfaces. Soap makes it possible for this film of water to separate rubbing fingers, whereas plain water does not. This happens by two mechanisms. The first being the non-polar end of soap attracts to skin oils forming a barrier over the skin with the hydrophilic end pointing outwards towards the water. This allows the water to attract to the barrier and fully wet the finger very easily. When there is no soap, the surfaces of two fingers rubbing squeeze out the water enough to have frictional contact between fingers, so it feels rough/sticky. With the soap barrier layer, the water doesn't squeeze out because it is attracted to the barrier layer, and thus the lubricating film of water remains to separate the fingers. The second mechanism is that soap reduces the surface tension physical property of the water. Similarly to above, the increased ease in ability for the water to penetrate tight locations causes water to more easily establish a film of water between rubbing fingers. In a way, the soap isn't what's causing the lubrication. It's the water.


Question: Why things that move fast in the dark have more "blur" behind them?

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 Why things that move fast in the dark have more "blur" behind them?

In general things don't have 'blur'. That's your brain filling in missing information with what it thinks should be there so visual information doesn't seem inconsistent. & #x200B; Like how if you wiggle a pencil just right it looks like it's bending, it's just your brain going 'oh that's obviously some sort of rubbery object, I'll just fill in the blanks'. & #x200B; In the dark the brain does this in overdrive because our (human) night vision is terrible, we also can't really see color very well when it's dark or around the periphery of our vision, mostly black/white/blueish. So in order for things to make sense, your brain just goes 'that's probably red, yeah let's go with red', it's tricking you, like how you can technically always see your nose, but you forget it's there because your brain deletes it as 'non-necessary information'.


Question: How does cruise control in a car work?

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 How does cruise control in a car work?

There's a speed sensor on the axle. It measures your ground speed. It sends a signal to a vacuum actuated link to increase or decrease throttle input so that the speed matches your setting. It basically just pushes or releases the throttle. That's the old way. A lot of cars have adaptive cruise control now that use radar ranging to determine distance between cars and adjust for that as well. Some will also pre-load the brakes and give you a warning to start braking in the case that traffic stops quickly. Those use an electric throttle position motor instead of vacuum. It's surprisingly simple. It's been a long time since I've installed a cruise control so I don't know how many use electric instead of vacuum. Regardless, the principle is the same. Sensor on an axle, match the speed by change in the signal.


Question: How can the James webb telescope see over 13 billion years back in time?

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 How can the James webb telescope see over 13 billion years back in time?

Light takes time to travel, and it travels one light-year (ly) in a year. So if you point your telescope at something that is 13 Billion ly away, the light entering the telescope had to travel all that distance, which takes 13 Billion years. This gives you a 13 Billion year-old look at whatever you're looking at.


Question: How is it that EMP's destroy electrical components but does not affect our own bodies' electrical impulses?

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 How is it that EMP's destroy electrical components but does not affect our own bodies' electrical impulses?

EMPs work primarily by generating a huge magnetic pulse. This pulse induces an electrical pulse in just about any electrical conductor. This mainly affects metals, most of which are decent conductors. They have electrons that are poorly bound to their parent atoms, so a strong electric or magnetic field can move them about. Your nerves, however, don't conduct electricity the way metals do. Even a very strong magnetic pulse won't induce much of a current in your nerves.


Question: Why do we feel sleepy in warm temperature rather than cold temperature ?

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 Why do we feel sleepy in warm temperature rather than cold temperature ?

I learned at least one of the reasons for this from a professor last semester. He's a kineticist (that's a field of chemistry) and very into endurance running -- and he told us just exactly why the perfect running temperature (high 60s to low 70s) is what it is: Pyruvate kinase Essentially, the heat outside actually interferes with the body's ability to make ATP, the energy molecule, out of the food we digest. This happens because pyruvate kinase, a crucial enzyme in ATP synthesis, is concerted mostly into a biologically inactive conformer at around 85 degrees F. This conformer is present in some portion at 70 degrees, but it's mostly the active form that dominates. After about 85 or so, you have a 60/40 ratio of the inactive to active forms. TL;DR heat slows down your metabolism and you run out of energy.


Question: How does paper currency (such as the US Dollar, or Euro) increase or decrease in value?

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 How does paper currency (such as the US Dollar, or Euro) increase or decrease in value?

Fiat money (tl;dr paper money) only has the value that the market places upon it. The best way to measure a currency's value is to compare it to a historically stable currency (frequently the US Dollar or the Euro). Rapid inflation occurs when those making investments panic about their investments and pull their money out. This is called a "run on the bank" and I'd recommend "It's a Wonderful Life" for an ELI5 understanding of the concept. Basically banks are institutions of leverage, they don't have your money in a vault, they invest it in the stock market or in mortgages expecting repayment over time. When that system of borrowing and repayment collapses, then the currency that is used to facilitate it drops in value. When that causes shops to close, or stop accepting payments in that currency, you have hyperinflation, which can result in (practically) worthless paper. When you sell something for $10 you are doing so with an understanding of what you can buy with $10. When you find that your $10 lunch now costs $20, and your $1000 rent is now $2000 etc, you stop selling your thing for $10 and start selling it for $20. If this keeps happening over the course of time, you could be asking for millions of dollars for the formerly $10 item just so that you can pay your billions in debts. You would find a $1 bill to be quite infuriatingly worthless at that point.


Question: How can something safe to eat, but not inhale, or vice-versa? I get that different systems process things differently, but why? What is chemically changing here?

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 How can something safe to eat, but not inhale, or vice-versa? I get that different systems process things differently, but why? What is chemically changing here?

Eating something dumps that thing into a vat of strong acid that starts to break down whatever is there. Then it goes on into your intestines to meet enzymes which break off the last little bits and your body can grab what it wants. Your lungs don't have that process and worse, it's a place where things get to go straight into your blood. I can't think of anything that could go into your lungs that you couldn't swallow safely.


Question: What causes the "singing" when you drive over bridges or certain types of asphalt at high speeds?

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</answer>
 What causes the "singing" when you drive over bridges or certain types of asphalt at high speeds?

Regularly- and tightly-spaced bumps, basically. Same principle at work when you run your fingers down the teeth of a comb, strum a washboard, or something like that. This is most noticeable on bridges with road surfaces made out of some kind of metal grid (to let water through and reduce weight, mostly). With regular roads, it'd be "rumble strips," either across travel lanes to warn traffic to slow down, or on shoulders to warn drivers to get back on the bloody road. Every time the vehicle's tires hit one of these bumps (whether raised or depressed), there's an impact noise. Just like running over a stick. But do a bunch of those in tight succession, and the ear/brain starts to interpret the resulting sound as a musical "pitch". Musical pitch is directly related to frequency of vibration. That's all sound is, really: shock waves propagated through a medium (usually air), that are detected by organs in the ear, transmitted to the brain, and interpreted as sound. So the faster the car is going, or the closer the bumps are together, the more of these impacts there will be in a second, producing a higher frequency of vibration and thus a higher pitch.


Question: Does removing the appendix make your immune system weaker?

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 Does removing the appendix make your immune system weaker?

No. Your appendix contains lymphoid tissue, but so does pretty much the entire length of the bowel, so it’s a loss of a very small segment of tissue overall. And if your immune system is weakened by the loss of some lymphoid tissues, you’ll just make more. There’s several organs that are big producers of immune cells (spleen, thymus, bone marrow, intestines, lymph nodes). And if one or more of these are gone, the rest will just pick up the slack. Source: I’m a surgeon who also happens to be living without an appendix.


Question: What is happening in your brain when you get that "off" feeling after watching something particularly disturbing?

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 What is happening in your brain when you get that "off" feeling after watching something particularly disturbing?

Not a psychology expert, but speaking from experience, sounds like dissociation/depersonalisation. It can happen after any trauma, including secondhand. People have different thresholds for it. It's not evil in itself--it protects you, in a way. The problem comes if it lasts longer or arises at times seemingly out of the blue. It's really helpful to get a process to talk to about this. It is treatable.


Question: Why do most cakes and dessert recipes call for eggs?

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 Why do most cakes and dessert recipes call for eggs?

In a cake, eggs act as a leavening agent, thus making cake light and fluffy. In baked foods like cookies, muffins, etc, eggs add moisture and act as a binder. I don't eat eggs, so I always look for the eggless version of things. There are substitutes for eggs depending on what you are baking.


Question: Why does sleeping in a car feel different than normal sleep?

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 Why does sleeping in a car feel different than normal sleep?

URL_0 Basically, when traveling, only half of your brain is asleep. The other half stays alert to any changes etc so that you may be able to respond to anything it views as a threat. But in a car (instead of in a house) your body also experiences a constant movement (part of highway hypnosis) that makes you sleepy. So it's easier to fall asleep but your mind still wants to remain partially alert in case of danger. Your results may vary. I am not a doctor. I cannot answer more in depth questions about why this may or may not be the case for you.


Question: Why and how does smoking cigarettes kill you?

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 Why and how does smoking cigarettes kill you?

Some people live longer (or shorter) lives due to their genetic makeup. But here's the thing...smoking has been shown overwhelmingly to decrease the years someone will live cancer-free across the spectrum of that genetic makeup. In other words, if you would have lived for 90 years before getting cancer without smoking, you'll get it at 65 with smoking (actual numbers are completely made up and are not necessarily statistically significant) while someone who would have gotten cancer at 25 because they smoked managed to avoid it until 40 without smoking. And that's just the cancer-related aspect - there are a whole host of other problems that smoking introduces that aren't directly cancer-related.


Question: What was gold replaced by FIAT money?

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 What was gold replaced by FIAT money?

Fixing the value of money to the price of a commodity which has, normally, very stable prices (due to limited production and demand for non-monetary purposes), effectively ensures stable prices. Gold fit those needs better than most commodities. However, it leaves governments with very limited capability to expand or contract the money supply in response to economic conditions. The "fiat money fiasco" has allowed central banks to respond to downturns and are a big reason why the financial crisis and covid downturns didn't look more like the great depression. The big downside of a fiat currency is if the central bank loses its credibility to set inflation targets. For example, see Turkey, where the president, who believes that low interest rates reduce inflation, has repeatedly fired heads of the central bank and the market largely believes (and acts as if) inflation will be high regardless of what the government does. When a central bank is independent and the market believes them when they say "monetary policy will aim for inflation of x%" then inflation remains low.


Question: Why aren’t the oceans warm if the Earth’s core is so hot? Shouldn’t the Earth be one big heated pool?

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 Why aren’t the oceans warm if the Earth’s core is so hot? Shouldn’t the Earth be one big heated pool?

The crust is much, much thicker than the oceans. The crust is 20 miles thick. The deepest part of the ocean is about 6-7 miles deep. The average ocean depth is 2.3 miles deep. Under the crust is almost 2000 miles of solid mantle before you get to the hot liquid core.


Question: How are some infinities bigger than others?

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 How are some infinities bigger than others?

The thing about math is, in some ways, it's like a game. The rules are whatever we say they are. Math is a human invention so all of its rules and definitions are whatever humans have come up with. So we have decided that, in math, we can have things called sets. Sets are just like collections of things. And sets can have sizes, which we define by the number of things in that set. But what about the size of sets that have an endless amount of things? Like the set of all natural numbers? Or the set of all real numbers? Well, in this case we have decided that to sets with an endless amount of things are the same size if you can create a rule that maps every single object in each of the sets on a 1-to-1 basis without missing any in either set. For example, take the natural numbers {0, 1, 2, 3....} Then take the even numbers {0, 2, 4, 6...} Clearly there are "more" natural numbers than even numbers, right? Because the natural numbers *include* the even numbers, plus more! Wrong. Given our rule, they are the same size because we can map them 1-to-1. Take any natural number, multiply it by 2 and you get a unique even number. Taken any even number, divide it by 2 and you get a unique natural number. 1-to-1 mapping. They are the **same size.** So we began to wonder if all sets with an endless amount of objects were the same size. Back in the day, a dude named Cantor came up with a rather elegant argument that showed that the set of real numbers is actually bigger than the set of natural numbers. He created a proof that showed that, no matter what rule you created to map the natural numbers to the real numbers, that there would exist real numbers not accounted for in that mapping. That there would always be and endless amount of real numbers left over. For that reason, we consider the set of real numbers as being "larger" than the set of natural numbers. Notice that, at no point have I used the word infinity. Unfortunately, "endless" *means* "infinite" and both of those sets we were talking about (natural and real numbers) are endless, so they are both infinite, yet according to our rules of math, the latter is larger than the former. Hence, "some infinities are bigger than others."


Question: How is it that helium is a rare element needed for X-rays that we will run out of but is used for silly things like balloons and voice modifiers?

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 How is it that helium is a rare element needed for X-rays that we will run out of but is used for silly things like balloons and voice modifiers?

Helium was stored as a government essential gas, however policy changed so that storage was no longer regarded as essential so the store was sold off and people used it for balloons. Helium is constantly being created on Earth, but the gas is also lost to space, it may become more difficult to extract, however it isn't going to "run out" URL_0


Question: Can AIs really learn things?

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 Can AIs really learn things?

You may be interested in Alan Turing's landmark 1950 paper [*Computing Machinery and Intelligence]( URL_0 ). It is not technical and is readily accessible to the layman. In it, he introduces the concept of the famous Turing Test, but often overlooked is his treatment of various arguments about why machines cannot be intelligent. In it, he considers the arguments and points out none of them really draw a clear line between humans and machines, a most can be applied to humans as well. If you claim that computers are merely responding to input and thus not intelligence, you can make the exact same claim about humans.


Question: Why do some greenscreens look painfully obvious and lower quality than others?

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 Why do some greenscreens look painfully obvious and lower quality than others?

A myriad of reasons ranging from a poor camera setup and staging/lighting of the green screen plates to limitations of the vfx software/compositor skills in pulling a decent key of the foreground object. There are relighting/edge blending issues that also have to be addressed when combining the foreground fill/matte and background plates to achieve a high-quality result.


Question: What really is information/data on an atomic scale?

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 What really is information/data on an atomic scale?

Information is an emergent property, it isn’t a “thing” in the same way protons and electrons are. We can for instance assign meaning to an arrangement of matter and it now “holds information” despite nothing at all actually occurring to the matter in question. For example we might point at a flag and say “If the enemy is spotted and trouble is coming, lower the flag to half-mast to indicate distress. If the flag is up you are fine.” Nothing changed with the flag itself yet it now holds information.


Question: How is looking up a hash table O(1), but looking up something in a normal array still O(n)? What's the difference between a hash table and a list of hashes?

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 How is looking up a hash table O(1), but looking up something in a normal array still O(n)? What's the difference between a hash table and a list of hashes?

Accessing an array is O(1). Perhaps you mean searching for something in an array. If the array is ordered then searching is O(log(n)). For an unordered array the search is O(n). Hashing means taking the search key and processing it in some consistent way to produce a single number which you can then use as the array index, i.e., the storage location in the array. If the keys are words then a simple hash would be to add the ASCII values of all the letters in the word so you'd find the entry for the word "A" in array slot 65. No searching is required, so the time to find an element doesn't depend on the size of the array (though it does depend on the size of the key). Obviously there are problems with the above simple hashing scheme. The words "ab" and "ba" would be stored in the same slot. The array would need to be very long to have space for long words. Read up more on [hash tables]( URL_0 ) to find out how these and other issues are handled.