Have you ever looked at something mundane and wondered "Why is that the way it is?"
I mean, there's a reason for everything and sometimes, those reasons can be kind of cool.
Have you ever looked at something mundane and wondered "Why is that the way it is?"
I mean, there's a reason for everything and sometimes, those reasons can be kind of cool.
Especially Reddit, where the community is so vast that you're pretty much guaranteed to find someone with the correct answer.
Yes, there are thousands of subreddits, so that can seem daunting, but many common curiosities have subreddits all their own.
The subreddit is one of those with a perfectly clear purpose, and for Reddit newbies that's definitely handy.
You shouldn't have to learn the language of an entire community to ask a single question.
Scrolling through the topics, you can find vintage kitchen gadgets, weird creatures, or even the answer to a question you hadn't thought to ask.
(The image above is of what turned out to be artillery used to create controlled avalanches.)
Like when a guy found this in his father's bedroom and really hoped it wasn't a sex thing.
It's not. It actually goes over boots to provide traction on ice and snow.
When a cleaner found this under a bed, a woman asked for help identifying it and was shocked to learn that it was a motion-sensing audio recorder.
She discovered pamphlets about video surveillance in her partner's desk and got the hell out of the house, staying with a friend while taking the whole matter to the police.
"What is this big hole that is usually found on milk cartons?" he asked, with an accompanying pic for context.
If it was, fridges everywhere would be a whole lot messier.
So let's call it an indent for the sake of pedantry.
There are a lot of things where an indent in plastic does act as pressure release. By popping outward, the container suddenly has more space for the pressure to spread out.
If the indent was meant to prevent explosions, it does a pretty poor job.
Which is why subreddits like this one are the only place where you should read all the comments.
Molds for plastic containers can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, so for small differences in volume, a "volume adjuster insert" is added to the inside of the mold.
Why would you pay to create a 1 gallon mold for the US market and a whole second 4 liter mold for Canada? It's only an 0.057 of a gallon difference.
Why not just put 1 gallon of milk in the 4 liter jug? Because customers don't like seeing empty space. They think they're getting ripped off, even though the volume of milk is exact.
And sometimes, the indent helps prevent explosions as a nice side effect.
Cool, right?