ELI5: Why do so many tech companies move to such expensive areas like in Cali? Do you really need a fancy office to build apps or Facebook? Why not be located somewhere cheaper cost of living.

It’s called a Business cluster. See the Silicon Valley case for example. Hollywood would be another example. Lots of businesses within the same industry settle in a geographic concentration. This makes it attractive for startups or venture capitalists to locate themselves there as well.

With much companies on a relatively dense area, it’s attractive for people who are searching jobs in this specific field to move there.

These clusters are often connected with universities, service providers, etc. specified on the given industry, which makes business relationships and stuff like that incredibly easier due to regional proximity and some kind of symbiosis between them.

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ELI5:What has changed in the last 40 years so that it now takes two incomes to maintain a household?

There is a book about this, called The Two-Income Trap.

It has a lot of interesting information about the phenomenon, but the basic gist is “women got jobs, so now the market has adjusted to match those two incomes, PLUS there is real economic value in having a homemaker (cheap cooked meals, babysitting, etc).”

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ELI5 : Since millions of years ago there was a much higher oxygen content, did fire behave any differently?

If I’m not mistaken, there was a relatively long period of time where trees had evolved but the cells that enabled trees to form rigid structures could not be broken down through biological processes (it took a long time for bacteria, algae, fungi to evolve the ability to digest). During this period, trees would die but not decompose. Forests would become massive areas of dead wood. These would catch fire and created staggeringly large fires. Much of the coal we consume today formed as a result of this period.

It’s known as the Carboniferous Period. With the entire planet covered in wood and microbes, it still took 60 million years before a microbe evolved an enzyme capable of breaking down lignin.

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ELI5: How could Germany, in a span of 80 years (1918-2000s), lose a World War, get back in shape enough to start another one (in 20 years only), lose it again and then become one of the wealthiest country?

This is a really huge question, but I’ll try and be brief. There are a couple of things to keep in mind about Germany; it is one of the largest and most populated states in Western Europe, and it has had a very strong industrial base for many many years.

After WWI, Germany was in pretty bad shape. It owed a ton of money in war reperations. This issue was dealt with by the Nazis basically just refusing to pay them.

More importantly though, Germany might have lost the war, but even the winners were in really rough shape. No one was willing to stand up to the Nazis until it was too late. When they started to remilitarize, no one stepped up because they either thought that the lot they were dealt in WW1 was too harsh, or because they were too war-weary to care. When Germany started to absorb parts of its neighbors, it was justified by claiming that it was done either to protect German nationals, or because the Germans had been invited to do it (which is partly true in some cases).

Further, once WW2 started, the Germans had a couple big benefits. Most of their immediate neighbors were too weak to do much, France and Britain wanted to avoid bloodshed. When they invaded Poland, they got help from the Soviet Union. Once the war really got underway, France folded almost immediately, and the British were pushed off of the continent not long after. France was gone, Britain was technically still at war but couldn’t mount an offensive, Italy was an ally, America, Spain, and the USSR were neutral, and much of Central Europe was already under Nazi control. They were able to take most of Europe without much of a fight.

Helping matters even more, Germany benefited from having some pretty revoltionary tactics, scientists, and equipment. In particular, the Germans wrote the book on blitzkrieg and tank warfare, which proved instrumental.
After they lost the war, the country was split into four administrative zones, occupied by the Americans, British, Soviets, and French. The American, British, and French zones were evnetually consolidated to become the country of West Germany, while the Soviet zone became East Germany. The Western Powers poured a ton of resources into rebuilding West Germany and getting them back up to speed (so that they could help fight the Soviets in the event of WW3). Since they’re still one of the biggest and most industrial states in Europe, it’s only natural that they’ve had a strong economy ever sense.

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ELI5: Why are humans so bad at growing teeth?

Unlike most animals, human diets have undergone a relatively rapid change in a relatively short period of time. Take an animal species and you’re looking a creature that’s been eating the same general diet for the last…million years or so.

Take humans, however, and our diets have changed drastically in the past…tens of thousand years, which in evolutionary terms is break-neck speeds. We’ve gone from diets heavy in fibrous plant materials, which are tough and require a lot of chewing to fully utilize, to being able to eat an entire meal through a straw. Basically our early, early, early ancestors had to chew on really tough, hard foods. These required large jaws with lots of teeth in order to get more energy out of.

As our diets got softer, our ancestors could get away with smaller jaws - which required less energy to grow and use. Using less energy while still acquiring the same amount in your diet as your large-jawed brethren = advantage.

So our species have evolved much smaller jaws in a very short order of time…and basically these problems are issues left for us to deal with thanks to this rapid evolution of cramming a lot teeth into a smaller space. Were it not for dental medicine, for example, people born without (or fewer) wisdom teeth might have an evolutionary advantage and wisdom teeth could’ve been weeded out over a few thousands years. I, for example, only had three wisdom. If that had given me an advantage, then my children would likely have had only three and so on and so forth.

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ELI5:People who are exposed to the cold more build a tolerance. Is this a physically built resistant, or is it all mental?

As someone who lives in Norway, I’d like to share a helpful mental trick.

Studies show that drunk drivers are more likely to survive accidents than sober drivers. This is because their bodies are more loose during the crash, compared to sober drivers who tense up. This looseness reduces the chance of injury.

Same thing applies to cold weather.

The more you try to fight the cold, the more you will feel it. So, when you’re in -35 degree weather, try to immerse yourself in the cold. Don’t fight it. Become one with it. Take deep breaths and fill your lungs with the icy coldness, and allow it to flow through you.

One trick I like to do is, instead of noticing how cold the air is, I will pretend that the air is room temperature but mint flavored. And I’m filling my lungs with minty goodness.

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ELI5: Why must I enter a CAPTCHA to pay a bill? Are they afraid a robot is going to enter a credit card on my behalf?

Answer 1: Yes, captchas are generally used to prevent automation by using (ro)bots. However, there are a couple of side effects. One would be that you can not “accidentally” pay the bill because you would have to enter the captcha first. A bot would also not just enter “a credit card” but instead do pretty much anything on there - like trying out different card numbers. Using a captcha verifies that you are human. When developers are unsure whether or not to use a captcha then they will usually go for it because you know, better have than not have.

Answer 2: I am a web developer and we do it because of the tremendous number of bots that randomly submit forms in an effort to spider our sites, and create junk as a result. A CAPTCHA dramatically lessens the amount of crap data we get.

 - without seeing the site in question, I must also presume the page does not require authentication (username/password) to use, which allows ‘bots in, causing the problems (and is likely a poor design).

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ELI5: What's the difference between someone who has a learning disability and someone who's just stupid/slow/dumb?

I would think of it in terms of a computer.

Stupid or dumb would just be someone with a slow processor. Everything works fine, it just doesn’t work that fast.

A learning disability would be a hardware defect. Maybe there is a problem in ram causing a corruption of data… the computer is working perfectly fast enough, it just encounters errors which make it difficult to complete a certain task.

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ELI5: When you have a cold, why does it always feel horrible in the morning and get better throughout the day?

Not a doctor, but I did just go to the doctor and had this explained to me. The reason you feel like shit in the morning is because you’ve been laying down all night, so the mucus just sits and builds up instead of draining. The sore throat is caused by infected mucus resting on the throat throughout the night, causing inflammation.

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ELI5: When knocked unconscious, what bodily function wakes a person back up? What determines when and how quickly it happens?

Definitely depends on what part of your brain needs to recover. I worked in an ER and our “go to move” was to take our knuckles and rub them vigorously across the sternum of a patients chest. (The bone between your breast) the pain wakes you REAL fast.

Comes in handy for less serious events like your buddy is black out drunk or gets knocked out at a bar.

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ELI5: How is lettuce able to be picked, shipped, processed, and shipped again, and still be green but if I don't finish a bag of premade salad in a week the lettuce turns brown?

Holding lettuce in water during processing and keeping them stored in a cool, low oxygen environment helps keep them fresh from picking to processing.
Once processed they are packed in air-tight sealed containers with a mix of gasses aimed at keeping their shelf-life and nice green colour.

Generally if you want to keep your salad pretty green store it iced-water in the fridge.

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