Recent comments in /f/explainlikeimfive

WeaponB t1_iuiez9p wrote

The don't care about the alarm going off.

Think about it this way: in theory, people hear a car alarm, look, and if they see a crime, they call the police. So now the cops are towing a car, the alarm goes off, people look and what? Call the cops and report that the cops are towing a car please send more cops?

In practice, people don't look for car alarms to report theft. But you know, in theory....

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Leucippus1 t1_iuievox wrote

The ECU.

The fuel mapping is something that just wasn't possible to the same degree with carburetors. We can really control the combustion to create that nice even burn (I forgot the term for it, wavefront, I think) that pushes the piston down with even power.

Add variable valve timing, smart turbochargers, 4 valve designs (2 intake, 2 exhaust), direct injection (shoot the fuel directly into the combustion chamber), and you can wring a lot of power out of smaller engines. Eventually we will talk about running water injection!

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valeyard89 t1_iuietqd wrote

Bacteria are usually what cause food to spoil, but they may require oxygen. The jars are pasteurized (sterilized) and sealed during production, this kills any existing bacteria and keeps others from getting in. Once you break the seal, the microbes floating in the air can get in it and cause it to spoil.

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sterlingphoenix t1_iuiesyg wrote

First, you're taking a bit of a gamble there. It might not taste bad, but that doesn't mean it isn't.

With that said, there are many factors that'll keep food from spoiling. Properly sealed food with all the air removed is one (and that might be the case with your salsa). The food itself being inhospitable to bacteria is another, and refrigiration is yet another factor.

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quinnwhodat t1_iuief20 wrote

Your hands go numb / muscles cramp up / face goes numb because of transient low blood calcium. When you breathe fast, you get rid of excess carbon dioxide making your blood less acidic. The albumin in your blood trades 2 protons (hydrogen ions) for 1 calcium divalent cation, making your blood calcium level transiently low in order to maintain blood pH homeostasis.

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darthandroid t1_iuieaku wrote

Imagine nitrogen is like tape, and it's easy to stick it onto something.

Normally, when you apply tape to something, you can do a little bit of work to remove the tape. But imagine two pieces of tape stuck to each other-- Nearly impossible to separate, at least without a lot of very careful work.

The particular form of nitrogen in the air, N2, is two nitrogen atoms stuck together, and like the tape, and they're very hard to separate.

Many/most plants rely on nitrogen fixation, which is a collection of processes for separating the two nitrogen atoms and sticking them to something else that's easier to for the plant to work with/consume.

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lumidaub t1_iuidvw9 wrote

You may be thinking that 1.5 degrees isn't that much. Because sure, whether it's 30° or 31.5° on any given day doesn't make much of any difference and you probably wouldn't even notice.

However, it's about global averages. The average temperature of Earth as a planet is the average of all temperatures measured everywhere on Earth near ground level on 365 days a year. If that average changes, it's because a large number of individual data points have changed significantly. While in some places and on some days it may have been colder than the year before, in most places and on most days, it was warmer. Not a lot warmer, the differences year-to-year are small. But decade by decade, the changes should average out - which they don't anymore.

There are a lot of heat sinks on Earth, most significantly the oceans. They absorb huge amounts of energy which is used by the lifeforms living in the oceans (plankton). This ecosystem is attuned to a certain amount of energy coming in from the Sun. It has evolved to use that energy in the most efficient way and thus to keep the temperature of the water steady. It takes vast amounts of energy to heat them up significantly because they are of course massive bodies of water. In the past, when natural causes changed the amount energy, it was usually at a rate slow enough for the ecosystem to keep up and adapt. So if you measure the average temperatures of the oceans (or rather temperatures just above sea level) and you see a rise, something is out of the ordinary. It means that there is more energy going into the oceans than they can absorb and the change is happening too fast for the ecosystem (and evolution!) to keep up with.

I'm no climate scientist so I can't tell you why the numbers are these exact numbers (like why is the absolute upper limit 3 degrees and not 4). But there are by now some quite sophisticated climate change models based on decades of climate research and huge amounts of data about past changes (going back not only decades but millennia). These models can simulate different outcomes for different future scenarios. They're not infallible of course and they are man-made. But these models are used to predict what would happen if temperatures increase by different amounts and that's where the upper limits come from.

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dimonium_anonimo t1_iuidszs wrote

Let's say you want to carry a box. Does the box feel heavy? That's because it's weight is exerted on you. You have to carry its weight in order to lift it. But the box is also being lifted because you are exerting a force on it. This happens always, in all scenarios and circumstances.

Let me give a few more examples that are easy to see, but you might not have thought about them. If you stick your hand out a car window, you feel a force pushing it backwards. The force of the air slamming into your hand. But also realize that if your hand weren't there, the molecules of air would be relatively undisturbed. You are pushing them out of the way to make room for your hand, so you are applying a force to the air molecules as well.

A rocket works because the burnt fuel is forced down and out through the nozzle by the expanding gasses behind it. The expanding gasses apply a force to the spent fuel, but the spent fuel also pushes back on the rocket, providing lift. (If you wanted to get right down the the bottom of it, the spent fuel is pushing on the expanding gasses of the currently burning fuel, and that causes them to push on the rocket because they want to go up, however, the body of the rocket gets in its way, pushing down on them to keep them contained instead of moving up... Just another example of reaction force)

Walk up to a wall and push on it. It might be easier to see with something very heavy, but still just barely movable. If you don't brace yourself, when you push on it, you will end up moving backwards instead. That's because it's pushing on you with the same force you are on it. If you do brace yourself, you might be able to move it a bit. You'll notice that you feel in your ankles that you are still being pushed backwards, and into the floor, meaning your legs are also pushing on the floor with a force, but the floor is pushing back on you (with friction) keeping you from moving backwards.

Every. Single. Force has an opposing force to consider. The fact that it is exactly the same magnitude I don't know if I have the ability to understand well enough to eli5, but the opposite reaction clearly makes sense to me. If I had to try to phrase what I think causes the equality part, I think it would involve the conservation of energy & momentum. I think if you pushes on something and it didn't push the same amount back on you, then you would give it more energy than you lost. I think that is the main reason. And since energy can't be created or destroyed, the forces have to be equal. (Big disclaimer: this last bit is speculation, not a guaranteed correct answer.)

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Elgatee t1_iuidpq3 wrote

What happens when you jump? You flex your legs and push the ground really hard. Eventually, you get away from the ground.

But why? You pushed DOWN, against the ground. How come you're going UP? That's Newton's 3rd law. As you're pushing the ground, it is also pushing against you. Since usually the ground is much heavier than you, it barely move if at all, while you move a lot more.

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Semyaz t1_iuidmis wrote

Not even remotely. The sun should follow an almost exactly the same path per latitude, but the path is different at every latitude. At the equator, the sun goes directly overhead on the equinox. The further from the equator you go, the lower the angle the sun rises from the horizon. The path is similar on the opposing latitude, but reversed from south and north horizons.

An interesting side point is that the tropic lines (tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn) are the lines where the sun goes directly overhead on the solstices. Outside of these lines, the sun never gets directly straight up. The opposite are the Arctic and Antarctic Circles. Those are the lines where the sun never sets around the summer solstice and never rises around the winter solstice. These lines of latitude move slightly every year to account for the irregular wobble of the earth and slight elliptical orbit.

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dougola t1_iuidimi wrote

You get a huge epinephrine and adrenaline dump into your system to activate the fight or flight response. If you can try breathing and focusing, sometimes you can overcome it. For me, mostly not. Getting on in the morning is because you are coming out of a low hormone phase and the two items mentioned above are activated to get you awake/alert cycle started.

Look for and listen to "Huberman Lab" podcast. That guy has a wealth of science based information in many areas of how our bodies work.

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breckenridgeback t1_iuidf75 wrote

In (Newtonian) physics, we think of things in terms of objects (which we assume are rigid, that is, they're like hard balls on a pool table and never squish or heat up or anything), forces, and position/motion.

Each object has, at any given moment, a position. That position is changing over time, and the change is called the object's velocity. And, in turn, the change in the object's velocity is called acceleration.

Changing the motion of a heavy object is harder than changing the motion of a light object. This is where we get the ideas of momentum (the velocity of an object times its mass) and of force (the acceleration of an object times its mass). Or, equivalently, you can think of force as the change in momentum over time, in the same way that acceleration is the change in velocity over time.

In the way I'm presenting it here, the definition of force gives you Newton's second law (the equation F = ma, that is, force equals mass times acceleration) for free: that's just what we mean by the word "force". It also gives you the first law: if force is zero, acceleration is zero, and therefore change in velocity is zero, too.

Newton's third law, on the other hand, says that all the forces in a system (possibly on more than one object) always add up to zero. In other words, if I apply a force +F to you, there is necessarily a force -F applied to me. If you're pushed forward, I'm pushed back. If you're pushed up, I'm pushed down. And so on.

But remember how we said earlier that one way to think of force is the change in momentum? Well, if all the forces in a system add up to zero, the total change in momentum must, therefore, also add up to zero. If you gain momentum upward, I must gain momentum downward; if you gain momentum to the right, I must also gain momentum to the left. So a modern way to describe Newton's third law is just that it describes conservation of momentum: you can never create or destroy momentum, only transfer it between objects.

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