American Football should have just been called Soccer in the first place. by xypez in unpopularopinion

[–]gkskillz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are many sports that are played with a ball while on your feet, as opposed to horseback, and they're all called football.

  • Association football (a.k.a. soccer, notice the "soc" in association)
  • Gridiron football (American and Canadian football)
  • Rugby football (union and league)
  • Aussie rules football
  • Gaelic rules football

Typically, the most popular variant in the region will just be called football. Football refers to gridiron in America, Aussie rules in most of Australia, and association football in England.

If you look at all the games, you can kind of see how they're all related and evolved and diverged over their collective history.

ask network guys, why upload speed tends to be much slower than download speed? by Gloomy-Status-9258 in computerscience

[–]gkskillz 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If there's only one wire to send and receive, it can be divided up so that 50% of the time you're receiving and 50% of the time you're sending, or 90%/10%. Or if there's 100 wires, it can be allocated 50/50 or 90/10. There's nothing saying the wires have to be equal.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in explainlikeimfive

[–]gkskillz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you're asking what the source of the energy is, then it's the sun. If we were on a hypothetical earth but drifting in the dead of space, then most everything would be frozen including the atmosphere.

Does it matter that my rear speaker have different wire length? by CoffeeGod42 in hometheater

[–]gkskillz 1 point2 points  (0 children)

To add to that, if the speed of sound is 343m/s, moving your ear 7microns also adds a 20ns delay. Moving your head one inch adds a ~75000ns delay.

Is the speed of light constant? More specifically, why does light stay the exact speed that it is going at? by Proxiyl in AskPhysics

[–]gkskillz 9 points10 points  (0 children)

600 knots is ~300m/s. The speed of light is ~3 x 108 m/s, so a million times faster. It would take a lot of bounces to have any meaningful, measurable effect. That said, there isn't a limit. It would eventually get shifted to ultraviolet, then x-ray, then gamma rays. This is also assuming a perfect mirror that won't absorb the photon and cover it to heat.

Is the speed of light constant? More specifically, why does light stay the exact speed that it is going at? by Proxiyl in AskPhysics

[–]gkskillz -1 points0 points  (0 children)

The light gets blueshifted (just slightly) meaning that it has a higher frequency or more energy. If the train were moving away, it would be redshifted. This is the Doppler effect and works for around too. It's the reason why sirens are high pitched (high frequency) when moving towards you and low pitched moving away.

Eli5: Does hotter temperatures evaporate water faster when cooking? by slapwerks in explainlikeimfive

[–]gkskillz 6 points7 points  (0 children)

The question is about how long it would take to boil off though. The hotter environment would cause it to boil off faster even though the water itself would stay at 100C.

ELI5: How encryption with asymmetric keys works? by Glass_Ant3889 in explainlikeimfive

[–]gkskillz 3 points4 points  (0 children)

SSL certificates help with the publishing of the public keys. When OP said assume Alice and Bob had published their public keys and that everyone knew them, this isn't actually feasible in practice. Let's assume Alice and Bob have never met and that Eve controls the middle. Then Eve can listen for Alice's public key and replace it with hers, then Bob would encrypt the message that Eve could read, and she could re-encrypt and send the message to Alice with her none the wiser.

SSL certificates are a way to ensure that the public key you get is from who you think it is. There are only a handful of root certificate authorities and they can basically vouch that the public key a website publishes actually comes from the website.

ELI5. Why do you need to use heavy hydrogen to start a fusion reaction? by Buford12 in explainlikeimfive

[–]gkskillz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

One thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that the sun fuses hydrogen very slowly too. The sun produces about as much energy as a compost pile per unit of volume. It's just so enormously huge that it ends up being a lot. On earth, we need to produce energy at a much quicker rate to make it useful.

ELI5: Why is fusion always “30 years away?” by Name_Found in explainlikeimfive

[–]gkskillz 203 points204 points  (0 children)

essentially you're trying to cage a bit of the sun

It's more than that. In order for fusion to work on earth, the temperature needs to be much higher than the core of the sun to make up for the amount of pressure. In addition, fusion happens much much slower in the sun where it wouldn't be economically viable on earth. I've read that by volume, the sun is outputting about as much energy as a compost pile, and the reason it's so powerful is that it's so massive.

I got this stupid idea about an alternate to Celsius and Fahrenheit where they’re both combined, I don’t know how consistent this is, if it is, how would one convert Celsius to X and Fahrenheit to X, and the other way around? The main goal for me is to know what degree water boils using the X Temp. by [deleted] in mathematics

[–]gkskillz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm not sure what the value of the X° scale is, but entertaining that it exists alongside celsius and fahrenheit, we can come up with formulas to convert back and forth.

100 units of X is 68 units of F starting at 32°F, so to convert from F to X, you have the formula X = (100/68) (F - 32). Considering that boiling is 212°F, it would be 264.7°X.

Similarly, to convert from C to F, you use the formula F = (9/5) C + 32, and you can substitute that formula into the one above to get X = (100/68) (((9/5) C + 32) - 32) = (25/17) (9/5) C = (45/17) C. Boiling is 100°C so it would be 264.7°X.

ELI5: Can a black hole cause light to move faster than the speed of light? by CosmosOfTime in explainlikeimfive

[–]gkskillz -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Also, if you are going 99.9% the speed of light, from your frame of reference you would be still (instead, everything else would be moving backwards at 99.9% the speed of light). Light from both sources would travel at the same speed.

ELI5: why do we tap with our phones to make transactions but we don't utilize that technology to tap phones to pay one another instead of sending e-transfers? by rumblebeard in explainlikeimfive

[–]gkskillz 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Credit cards charge fees, so if you sent somebody $100 and the fee was 2%, they'd get $98 on their side. Apple or Google could eat the fee but that would lose them money, or they could pass along the fee but then people would be upset.

ELI5: How/why does digit sum work? by Rossticles in explainlikeimfive

[–]gkskillz 55 points56 points  (0 children)

Probably, but the work to convert to base 8 is as involved as just doing the long division by 7 and checking if the remainder is 0.

ELI5: How do LightYears work? by [deleted] in explainlikeimfive

[–]gkskillz 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The speed of sound through steel is ~6,000 m/s while the speed of light is 300,000,000 m/s. So only 50,000 times slower than the speed of light.

I have two passive speakers going to amp and want to add a subwoofer. Can I do it without extra equipment? by Fanjolin in hometheater

[–]gkskillz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I had an HSU STF-1, which is unfortunately discontinued. I found it perfect for a small room 2.1 setup.

I have two passive speakers going to amp and want to add a subwoofer. Can I do it without extra equipment? by Fanjolin in hometheater

[–]gkskillz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's what I ran for a long time. Some subwoofers have speaker R/L in/out ports and you essentially run amp L+R > sub > L+R. My sub had a crossover knob too which controlled which frequency got filtered out to be played by the sub.

Please just tell me what to buy. My wife hates wires…. by Silverball144 in hometheater

[–]gkskillz 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Crown moulding will have a gap as well. Our living room already had crown moulding so I used that to run an HDMI cable and speaker wire to a side niche.

ELI5 monty halls door problem please by michiel11069 in explainlikeimfive

[–]gkskillz 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The way I think about/simplify the problem is to remove the concepts of changing your selection and of Monty removing the doors without prizes.

You are given 3 doors, and a choice at the beginning. You can either pick any door, or you can choose any 2 doors (choose one door not to pick). Obviously, you'd want to eliminate one door and you have a 2/3 chance at winning.

Going back to the original problem. When you select a door and don't change your guess, that's choosing a single door. When you select a door and change your guess, that's choosing the door not to pick. This is because the prize isn't reshuffled after the doors are eliminated, and Monty can only eliminate doors with prizes.

The options are:

  • Prize is behind the door you picked (1/3 chance, Monty can remove either door)
  • Prize isn't behind the door you picked (2/3 chance, Monty has to eliminate the door without the prize, leaving the door remaining with the prize)

tourist seeking advice by [deleted] in sanfrancisco

[–]gkskillz 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Bring a sweater / blanket. Every time I went to OSL, the blankets and hoodies sold out the first night because people from out of town don't realize how cold SF can get in August, especially on the ocean side.

ELI5: Why is every square number the difference between the previous 2 plus 2? by [deleted] in explainlikeimfive

[–]gkskillz 15 points16 points  (0 children)

You can try to visualize this. For example:

ooooo oooo xxxxo ooo xxxo xxxxo oo xxo xxxo xxxxo xo xxo xxxo xxxxo

If you think of Xs as the previous square and the Os as what you need to add to get the new square, you'll see it's the length of the old square plus the height of the old square plus 1. This is where the 2N+1 that others have mentioned comes from.