What is fascism?

Fascism is nationalism taken to the extreme. In a fascist state there is no free market or capitalistic competition. Everything is owned by the government and everyone works for the benefit of the nation.

So instead of three car companies competing to sell the most cars there is only one car company that makes all the cars for the whole country. That goes for all industries in the country.

It's a little different from socialism in that the focus is on the strength of your particular nation over all others, but the practices within the nation may be similar to socialism.

The Nazis were fascists because they wanted to further their own way of life and conquer Europe to make it all like them. Everyone else be damned.

What Einstein meant when he said, "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

20th century science demonstrated conclusively that space, time, energy and matter all operate in ways that are profoundly counterintuitive to the human mind. Our perceived reality bears little resemblance to the outright weirdness that is the quantum world. We are just monkeys with a mind that evolved to solve monkey problems.

He was referencing the idea that it is impossible to prove that anything exists other than what's in your mind. So, reality can be viewed as only what is in your mind - which can be viewed as an illusion.

Why does it feel better to curl up in a ball when you have a stomach bug?

It seems that lying in the fetal position (curled up in a ball) has some sort of deeply comforting physical and psychological effect on people. Many people who have gone through severe trauma will go into this position. Most people also sleep in some variant of this position - lying on their side with their knees tucked up and body curled forward. People also tend to be comforted by having a thick blanket put on them. For this reason emergency workers have such blankets on hand for victims of trauma.

Even some animals respond to this - blankets are used in rehabilitating orphaned elephants to provide psychological comfort. So one reason that curling up makes you feel better could be psychological comfort.

The other thing is that curling up reduces the tension on your abdominal area. If you lay out all straight or stand up, your abdomen is being pulled taught and increasing the pressure/stimulation to your GI tract. As you probably have experienced even something usually insignificant like a waistband or seatbelt can worsen nausea. So a position that decreases stimulation in that region would help you feel better.

Why do manufacturers always exclude batteries with their products i.e. 'batteries not included?'

• Makes their product cheaper
• Gives the consumers choice about what kind of batteries they want to us
• Safer and easier to ship
• Don't have to worry about the shelf life of the product

In a Democracy, if nobody knows which candidate anyone else voted for, how do we know we can trust the results of an election?

Audit trails and exit polling.

Audit trails allow you to demonstrate that the final tally declared in the end is directly derived from the physical votes cast. This is one of the major arguments against electronic voting: electronic records can be erased and overwritten relatively easily (just look at your hard drive). You can't remove and replace paper ballots without a physical act. The ballots go somewhere, and systematically getting rid of thousands of ballots and replacing them with new ones would be much more difficult to fake than changing digital data.

Now, of course, there exist lots of countries that have exactly this problem. This is common in Africa (Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya) and other countries. Iraq claimed Saddam Hussein was elected with 100% of the vote in 2002. In these instances, the fraud is able to be carried out because of the oppressive and essentially autocratic regimes -- everyone knows the fraud is happening, but no one can do anything about it.

But let's assume for a second that a government does systematically change the election results. Even then, in a free country with free press, there exists a check: exit polling. News stations typically poll people as they leave a sample of polling places to see how they voted. these exit polls are how they make their predictions about who won before any votes are even counted. These exit polls are based on interactions directly between the people and the news agency -- the government is not involved. So, if a government did anything more than tilt a close election one way, it would show up as a major departure from the exit polls and prompt an investigation.

The only way for a government to systematically manipulate the results of an election would be to both manipulate the results and manipulate every single news agency reporting on the results. Given the radically different biases of the news agencies, that isn't likely to happen in most civilized countries. It's far, far cheaper and easier to manipulate elections by selectively preventing or encouraging people from voting in the first place.

How/why do old games like Ocarina of Time, a seemingly massive game at the time, manage to only take up 32mb of space, while a simple time waster like candy crush saga takes up 43mb?

A large chunk of a game's size comes from things like textures and audio files. Older games had very small, simple textures if they used them at all. In contrast, newer games tend to use high-resolution images that take dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of megabytes just by themselves.

Likewise, audio in old games was pretty simple. Older systems synthesized sounds, allowing the game to just supply some basic instructions to control them. Now, audio is typically recorded and stored with the game, making the overall size larger.

Why is a Cover Band allowed play gigs and make money, but if they upload those same songs to YouTube and try to monetize them they are breaking copyright laws?

A cover band is not allowed to make recordings of cover songs or even perform them live without paying licensing fees to the original copyright holder. However, in the case of live performance, it's the venue who will pay the fees through a performance rights organization. So if the band is performing at a venue that does its job, then they don't have to worry about the licensing issues.

For recordings (or youtube), they need to pay a standard licensing fee. The copyright holder of the original song can't demand a bigger fee or forbid the use of their song outright, they have to accept the standard licensing fee.

What use are our wisdom teeth to us? And why haven't we evolved to not need them?

The most common theory is that human ancestors ate more plants and needed the extra molars to help grind down the plant material. As human diets changed, we didn't develop as largeand now they aren't quite big enough for wisdom teeth. This makes them a vestigial body part - a part that is no longer really useful for an organism, but has stuck around. We haven't evolved to not have wisdom teeth because the evolution of our jaw happened faster and having the extra wisdom teeth wasn't enough of a disadvantage to our ancestors that those without them were able to pass on their genes significantly more successfully.

Generally, I think the better question for evolution is "why did this evolve?" rather than "why not this?" A lot of times we can't know why something did not evolve because evolution often comes from random mutations so whatever evolutionary trait that happened to pop up is the one we get. However, we can usually make a good guess as to why a particular part of the body was useful.

Why can't we choose to rotate our eyes individually like a chameleon?

The same reason we don't manually control our digestion system: We have no need to.

Deeper explanation: Predators have their eyes both facing forward so they can judge distance (depth perception) when hunting prey. If we want to look left, we can look left. If we want to look right, we can do that too. It doesn't take long for you to look left and right and have an idea of your surroundings. Whilst true that it takes more energy to keep looking left and right, the quality of our vision is better because you have this contant depth perception.

Animals which are hunted from all directions (like fish) have eyes on the sides of their head so they can have a greater arc of vision to see oncoming predators. This requires less energy, but they have no depth perception. Luckily, they don't need it. They don't need to know how close a predator is, they need to know WHERE it is, and swim as fast as possible in the opposite direction.

We're predators. We need to see what's infront of us so we can hunt and navigate more easily.

How do microwave ovens generate microwaves?

Why is it that a person can't take a large amount of over the counter pain relievers, like Tylenol or Ibuprofen, to get the same effects as stronger painkillers like Vicodin or Hydrocodone?

Different method of action. Opioids like hydrocodone and Oxy work by binding to neuroreceptors(neuro means brain) which send a depressive signal, which basically means that the signal numbs your central nervous system.
I don't remember the exact MoA of the others so to just put it simply, ibuprofen and aspirin work by reducing inflammation in your body, and Tylenol works by simply cutting off the pain signal on its way to your brain.

How apes with a similar muscle mass are so much stronger than human?

There's a few reasons but functionally most of them come down to finer muscle control. If you look, for example, at muscle bundle innervation we control much finer sets of muscles at a time. Great apes, on the other hand, fire larger bundles at once resulting in stringer but jerker motions. Mechanically speaking there are ask changes in insertion points to control leverage advantages vs mobility advantages as needed. Just watch a chimp doing things that require fine control and they look very clumsy compared to a human. Also, keep in mind that there's learned flexibility in both systems and humans can be quite strong and some chimps have learned to be quite dextrous (I.e. The differences of the distributions are further exaggerated by the tendencies of the species). Basically though, you're seeing the result of 6 million years of evolution in support of shorter reproductive cycles & increased intelligence and took use, the musculature and nervous system changes were critical to support those advancements.

If cats are lactose-intolerant, how did we come to the belief that giving cats milk = good?

Cats are carnivores, meaning they depend entirely on meat and fat for sustenance. We add non-meat products to their food, such as grain/corn, but with enough protein and fat to nourish them properly, as well as a special chemical called "taurine," which is vital to a lot of different functions in the body. Cats cannot digest the sugar (lactose), but they go bananas over the fat. They enjoy the milk for the fat alone, but a cat doesn't know what "lactose intolerance" is. This then gives them the squirty poops, as it does with some people. Most people can see is that the cat loves it, so give it more. We do the same thing with our human children and candy. Terrible side effects, but they like the taste and cry for it, so give them more!

Why does breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth work so well during exercise?

So the reason it's advised to breath in through your nose and out the mouth is that it slows down the rate of breathing. If you breathe solely via your mouth, you run the risk of breathing too fast and reduce the efficiency of oxygen exchange (within the lungs, an exchange of oxygen/carbon dioxide happens at the blood level - if you breath too quickly, there might not be enough time for as much oxygen to bind as there could be. As a consequence, less oxygen is circulating to feed your muscles).
Try right now! Breathe swiftly for about 30 seconds and you'll soon notice yourself getting light headed (don't pass out though please).

TL;DR breathing through the nose slows down ventilation allowing more time for gas exchange

Why do pimples (zits) on the inside of your nostrils hurt so much more than any others?

The tissue inside your nose isn't very thick and has tons of specialized nerve cells right at the surface, which means that when a pore swells with infection (a zit), the skin is pulled tight and the pressure under the already thin tight skin pushes against all those nerves, causing signals to fire and increasing the painful sensation. Plus there just isn't much space in there.