Recent comments in /f/explainlikeimfive
GeorgeCauldron7 t1_jacwrdf wrote
Reply to comment by scottshilala in ELI5: Why is it that when fertilizers make their way into waterways, all the oxygen disappears, killing the fish? by Psychological-Dog994
So does the algae itself consume oxygen (aerobic respiration?), or produce oxygen (photosynthesis?) in order to survive? Sorry, I study inorganic geochemistry but don't know much of anything about biology or botany.
Is there any difference between green algae and orange algae? I monitor water quality on a few streams, and the stream with the lowest dissolved oxygen (~30%) has both green and orange algae present, while the other streams have only green algae and have DO of 70-90%.
Also, are there any other plants that have a significant matting effect that dampens oxygen dissolution? Like a pond full of lily pads?
GeorgeCauldron7 t1_jacw5i8 wrote
Reply to comment by pdpi in ELI5: Why is it that when fertilizers make their way into waterways, all the oxygen disappears, killing the fish? by Psychological-Dog994
Don't worry, when winter rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
thieh t1_jacw3mb wrote
Reply to ELI5: Why was Chinese culture so influential throughout all of East Asia particularly Japan and Korea? by astarisaslave
>From the little I know about East Asian history, Japan and Korea took forever to embrace Western culture
It took around 50-60 years for Japan. To be fair, I start counting from people showing up with enough military capabilities to force treaty upon the government. (Perry's expedition)
drafterman t1_jacw2sw wrote
Reply to ELI5: Why was Chinese culture so influential throughout all of East Asia particularly Japan and Korea? by astarisaslave
Because it was the only major culture there. Japan is an island and Korea is a peninsula. So on one side you have China and on all other sides you have vast ocean. In terms of being influenced, there wasn't any other options.
phiwong t1_jacvydj wrote
Reply to ELI5: Why electric vehicles aren't equipped with solar panels on the roof so they can charge while moving or parking? by FullCloud
It generally costs too much for any sort of additional utility it creates.
A quick calculation. An average EV would have about 50 Kwh battery, that is 50,000 Watt hours of battery. The average solar panel produces 200 Watts/m^2 and even optimistically, there wouldn't be more than 4 sq meters of space on a typical car for solar panels. So the panel would charge at 800 Watt hours per hour of charging. A typical solar panel parked in most places on a sunny day achieves about 4-5 hrs equivalent of "full sun". So this means around 4,000 Watt hours if the car is parked an entire day, charging. This is less than 10% of the battery capacity.
In practice (not so sunny days, parked in garage, temperature, shade etc) a solar panel mounted on car would be lucky to achieve even 25% of this. So this amounts to 2.5% charge on a typical car battery.
This is simply not worth the cost of the panels and electronics since just the additional weight of the panels and electronics probably increases the electrical usage by 1-2% (the car now has to carry the panels etc). So the net result is minimal and would just never justify the cost.
ZuperLucaZ t1_jacvxq0 wrote
Reply to comment by Bensemus in ELI5: How do contactless payments(ApplePay, GooglePay, SamsungPay) work? by oatli
Exactly, that’s what I meant, this is a subreddit for dumbing down answers to make the answer digestible, both our descriptions are practically the same
The point of the last paragraph was to state that the phone can’t always be scanned while you card can
Dungwit t1_jacvuvw wrote
Reply to ELI5: Why is it that when fertilizers make their way into waterways, all the oxygen disappears, killing the fish? by Psychological-Dog994
The nitrogen feeds algae.
Algae requires oxygen to survive.
With all the excess nitrogen feeding it the algae multiplies enormously until there is so much it is consuming all the oxygen and killing all the fish as a result.
Owlstorm t1_jacvlno wrote
Reply to ELI5 How did we figure out the order for PEMDAS? Like how do we know that that order is correct? by ToodlyGoodness
It's an arbitrary convention, and hasn't entirely caught on for the order of MD and AS, or even MD vs AS.
For those, I recommend always using parentheses to avoid confusion regardless of the convention.
Flapflapimabird t1_jacvhbq wrote
Reply to comment by manofredgables in eli5 perpetual motion is impossible but why haven't we made something that just goes on for a really long time that we then service so it can keep going? by FrozenKyrie
Don’t format your posts like this. I don’t read it.
I’m not shilling free energy, you can relax. Lmfao.
We’re also talking about two different things.
[deleted] t1_jacv3nz wrote
Dangerous-Cricket196 t1_jacv246 wrote
Reply to comment by Leonarth5 in eli5 What is the purpose of those little “I am not a robot” buttons. Can a robot seriously not detect and click them? by Lord-Zippy
What if i use touch on my notebook? There won’t be mouse movement then
gl00mybear t1_jacv0mz wrote
Reply to comment by pdpi in ELI5: Why is it that when fertilizers make their way into waterways, all the oxygen disappears, killing the fish? by Psychological-Dog994
Specifically in this case, why the Illinois river is infested with carp.
Flair_Helper t1_jacumbp wrote
Reply to ELI5: Why electric vehicles aren't equipped with solar panels on the roof so they can charge while moving or parking? by FullCloud
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explainlikeimfive-ModTeam t1_jaculwv wrote
Reply to ELI5: Why electric vehicles aren't equipped with solar panels on the roof so they can charge while moving or parking? by FullCloud
Please read this entire message
Your submission has been removed for the following reason(s):
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Please search before submitting.
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Ansuz07 t1_jacul6b wrote
Reply to comment by Beto4ThePeople in ELI5: Why electric vehicles aren't equipped with solar panels on the roof so they can charge while moving or parking? by FullCloud
Exactly. I did the math on this in another post and under ideal conditions, solar panels on a car would - over the course of an entire day - produce the same amount of charge as two minutes on a conventional charging station. Under normal conditions, that would be closer to one minute.
They just don't produce enough charge to make it worthwhile.
Loki-L t1_jactp9y wrote
Reply to ELI5: Why electric vehicles aren't equipped with solar panels on the roof so they can charge while moving or parking? by FullCloud
Solar panels don't really collect enough energy compared to what a normal car consumes to keep going.
In addition to that the panels will add cost and weight to he car. Under bad circumstances solar panel may actually decrease the range of a car rather thane extend it, because the car consumes more extra energy to carry the weight of the panels around than the panels give it.
There are some extreme cases like specially built racing cars that are ultra light and race through Australia with the power of the sun.
For normal cars that have things like safety features and amenities and drive though places that are not desert it would not work.
This is not an engineering problem that can be overcome with better technology, there simply isn't very much solar energy that hits a patch of earth the size of a car. and the minimal amount of energy to move something the car even with the most efficient engine is also fixed. Those are hard limits.
It makes much more sense to put some solar panel on the roof of your garage and charge the car while it is in there (potentially overnight with the help of a battery).
Another way to look at this is to look at nature.
Plants are solar powered and animals are powered by eating plant or each other.
Why doesn't a cow simply start doing photosynthesis so it has to eat less grass. Mostly because evolution does not work that way, but also because the amount of solar energy you can collect from the area of a cow hide is so much smaller than what you ca collect in a meadow full of grass.
There are some animals like sea slugs who do some photosynthesis but they don't need much energy because they don't move around much. A sea slug floating in the water needs less energy than a cow that keeps running around.
So you can totally power a car with solar energy alone, provided you either collect the solar energy outside the car and let it harvest it like a cow eating grass by plugging it in, or you can put the solar panels on the car but than you have to build it ultralight and only drive it in the desert, or you can build it like a normal car and put solar panels on it but simply not move it much at all.
Gnonthgol t1_jactnd5 wrote
Reply to ELI5: Why electric vehicles aren't equipped with solar panels on the roof so they can charge while moving or parking? by FullCloud
The amount of charge you would get from a solar panel on the roof would be negligable. It would take days or weeks with good weather to get enough charge to get to the next charging station. And the weight of the solar panels and charger would reduce your overall milage.
Some years ago before electric vehicles became as common Nissan was pushed into this on their Leaf. They did the math and had worked out that it would not work but eventually gave in to public pressure. However they mounted a smaller solar panel and would only charge the 12V service battery, not the main battery. This did make some sense as it allowed them to stay parked for weeks and months without running out of charge on the service battery.
ZerexTheCool t1_jact7q3 wrote
Reply to comment by its-a-throw-away_ in ELI5: Why is skin considered an organ? by PapaMamaGoldilocks
Enough of them
Smallpaul t1_jact4ov wrote
Reply to comment by whereisfatherjack in Eli5: How did people know how long a year was in olden times? by Slokkkk
They had a tiny fraction of the content. They didn’t know what an atom was, not a galaxy, nor a continent, a complex number, etc.
They may have had wisdom about how to run their societies, live a good life and live in their local environment, but that is not the same as having vast global knowledge.
[deleted] t1_jact28v wrote
Burtttttt t1_jact1wh wrote
Reply to comment by lil_kreen in ELI5: How can a 100GB game get an 80GB update and still be about the same size afterwards? by MissAJHunter
Good analogy!
blipsman t1_jact0vr wrote
Reply to ELI5: Why electric vehicles aren't equipped with solar panels on the roof so they can charge while moving or parking? by FullCloud
Some are,.. the Fisker Ocean has them. But they the amount of surface area generates so little power relative to needs of vehicle, especially since it’s often parked inside a garage, or night time, or cloudy. They cost a lot, would be expensive to repair if damaged.
phadrus56 t1_jacsrc5 wrote
Reply to ELI5: Why electric vehicles aren't equipped with solar panels on the roof so they can charge while moving or parking? by FullCloud
I may be wrong but I don't think a solar panel that small could make a significant difference. 6 to 10 wats per SQ foot. To charge some vehicles takes about 7200 wats.
TorakMcLaren t1_jacsonl wrote
Reply to ELI5 How did we figure out the order for PEMDAS? Like how do we know that that order is correct? by ToodlyGoodness
There's a sense in which it's totally arbitrary, like the alphabet. It could be any order, but the important thing is that we settled on a particular order.
On the other hand, there's a sense in which the order we use was the only one that made sense, or maybe one of two that made sense. Let's forget about division and subtraction for a second. Multiplication is just repeated addition, and exponentiation (or "order" if you use BODMAS) is just repeated multiplication. So it really only makes sense to go power-multiplication-addition or addition-multiplication-power. Then, we get parentheses (or brackets for BODMAS). The whole point of brackets is to say "DO THIS BUT FIRST," so it has to be at the start.
Now, subtraction and division are just shorthands for adding negatives or multiplying by fractions, so that's why they go in pairs with addition and subtraction being equal and multiplication and division being equal.
So why exp-muli-add? Well, we often want to write something like 3y²+2y+6. If we used add-mult-exp, then we'd need to rewrite this as:
(3×(y²))+(2×y)+6
So we pick the format that makes the notation simpler and easier to read.
Statalyzer t1_jacx0n3 wrote
Reply to comment by CorporalOtter in ELI5: Why do we take that deep, involuntary breath when idle out of nowhere? by respectcrazy
Yeah I get that, but isn't that a deliberate choice to get your body in certain state before making a quick and precise motion (like snipers timing their shots with their breathing)?