How do corporate takeovers work? How does a company forcibly buy another?

Corporations have stock, which is ownership in the company. If you control enough of the stock then you own the company. If we take a simple company with 100 shares of stock the founder generally keeps 51 shares and sells 49 shares to investors. Say it looks something like this:

• Founder (F) - 51 shares
• Alice (A) - 20 shares
• Bob (B) - 20 Shares
• Charlies (C) - 9 shares

F has a majority so what he says goes. If later F needs cash for a divorce he may sell C 10 shares. F now has 41 shares but still has more than anyone else so he still runs the company. A may then go to C and buy those 19 shares off of him (giving her 29 shares) and go to B and buy 13 shares from him. Now A has 42 shares and F only has 41. A now owns the company whether F likes it or not.

How do companies decide whether to choose to list their IPO in NYSE or NASDAQ

The NYSE has very stringent requirements that make it tough for smaller companies to be listed on it. This is why we usually see the biggest companies on there.
NASDAQ is more friendly for start-ups and tech IPOs (Initial Public Offering). They still have lots of requirements but not as tough as NYSE.
A lot of companies start their public life in the OTC (Over the Counter) markets, then switch to NASDAQ or NYSE depending on their current financial strength. With the bigger IPOs, a company will start off on the NASDAQ and then switch to NYSE.
Why would they do this? Historically, the NYSE is the most trusted exchange for traders, which gives it a lot more volume.

Why don't journalists simply quote Obama's original stance on whistle blowers, and ask him to respond?

Because real journalism is dead in the US mainstream media.

Real journalism is hard, it requires not taking sides, research, asking tough relevant questions, and filtering out the bullshit and propaganda, then finding the truth and communicating it to the public in an accessible way. All of which requires motivation, intelligence, a belief in the public good, credibility, a desire to speak truth to power and hold the powerful accountable. None of which applies to the vast majority of mainstream outlets today.

Corporate media wants the absolute minimum cost to generate content in the shortest possible time that maximises ratings (i.e. creates drama) but without upsetting other corporations, lobbyists, and advertisers. Also, given that most of the media is owned by half a dozen conglomerates, the media companies cannot risk or upset the other subsiduaries or call into question the close relationship between corporations and politicians.

Investigative journalism is the antithesis of the above; it's expensive, takes effort, takes time, requires an unbiased attitude, and risks pissing off the powerful - it's much easier to skim the surface, regurgitate press releases, oversimplify stories (i.e. good vs evil), make up stories or deliberately misrepresent the facts, and to lob softball questions at the powerful. After all, if you ask tough questions then they think politicians will stop giving access. Then with that environment, the effect on the journalists is pretty much a done deal.

How did the first human to learn two languages (assuming s/he did) do it? How could two peoples who can't communicate with language exchange languages?

The same way you would pick up a foreign language when travelling, not having a dictionary.

You'd point at things and learn the local name for it. Then between hand gestures and context, you'd pick up the rest.

Why does the United States military have bases in other countries but other countries don't have bases in the United States? What are the odds of another country putting a base in the US?

A lot of countries host bases for other countries. There are a few advantages to this.

• First - Base leases usually come with money. Most countries like to have money come in.
• Second - Base leases usually come with favors or otherwise improve relationships between the countries. Want to influence a powerful country? Hosting one of their bases is a good way to do it.
• Third - Bases provide defense.

The US doesn't host much in the way of foreign forces because none of those things are terribly important to them. The US pretty much exclusively plays the role of patron rather than client. The US does host some small numbers of foreign forces, but only for the purposes of training. The US would probably not be happy hosting any of the countries with global aspirations, because they are exactly the countries they would be the most concerned about attacking the US.

How Amway type schemes work?

They tell you that you'll get rich if you sell their product. They charge you a fee to become an 'authorized dealer'. Most people are bad at selling things and can only sell to their immediate friends and family, who will buy because they feel sorry for you.
The catch is that they person who brought you into Amway gets a cut of all the money you bring in (and the person that brought them in gets a cut and so on). The only way to really make money is to bring in more people under you to sell stuff.
The problem, as with any pyramid scheme, is that there's only so many people you can sucker into joining & the people at the top have brought in so many suckers they just need to sit back and let the money roll in while you, at the bottom, are struggling to find enough people to join to even make your initial investment back.

Why should I care about my privacy if I'm not doing anything seriously illegal?

Do you close the door when you go to the bathroom? You might even do it when nobody else is around. Even though picking your nose is a pretty common activity, most people don't do it when other people are watching. Same thing with many other activities - they're private. They're nobody's business but our own.

If you were sitting at a table in a restaurant talking with a friend, would you want me sitting at the next table, turned toward you and obviously listening? What if I took out my phone and started recording you?

At a public pool, would it be okay if I walked around taking pictures of people sunbathing? It's public so I should be able to take pictures of anything I want. The people being photographed should mind because they're not doing anything illegal.

TCP and UDP using real world examples.

TCP uses back and forth communication, like a telephone call. If one person didn't hear something, they can ask for it to be repeated.

UDP uses 1 way communication, like TV or Radio broadcasts. If you miss something, tough noogies, just keep listening.

Why are the CIA and NSA separate entities if they're both about intelligence?

The NSA is tasked with a highly technical and specific job: making and breaking codes and monitoring other people's communications. The CIA handles human intelligence mostly: agents, stealing stuff, reading foreign newspapers and journals (you'd be amazed how much can be learned from this open source intelligence).

It was felt that it was best to keep the mathematicians and computer people at NSA separate, and most countries do the same thing, with Britain having SIS as the CIA equivalent and GCHQ as the NSA one.

Why marijuana triggers panic attacks for certain people?

Here's my guess: some people's anxiety is a defense mechanism for their body. It allows them to be constantly vigilant about things they perceive as threats to their physical and emotional well-being. Pot can be very physically relaxing and mentally distracting, leaving highly anxious people to feel less vigilant and more vulnerable. Their body has a panic response to this, because on some level they feel like they're in danger.

Why does the US not add tax to the displayed prices of goods?

Because sales tax rates vary so wildly between state to state, county to county, and even down to the Municipal level.

So, if a business wishes to advertise, it would be close to impossible to list the actual price + tax, when it would vary so much.

Lets say you are a national corporation, you sell your products across the US. And your new product is coming out, with a retail price of $100. If you tried to include the price of sales tax into it to advertise it on national TV, which rates do you use? If Austin, Texas has an 8% sales tax, then the price would be $108, but if over in Dallas, TX, the sales tax is only 6%, then the price would be $106.

Which price would you advertise? If you advertise the 106 price, then the people in Austin will expect 106, not the 108 it actually is for them. If you advertise the 108 price, then the people in Dallas would be expecting it to cost more then it is for them, and some might decide not to buy it.

So, to account for the varying tax rates, they just advertise and list the retail price, so everyone knows they are paying the same price for the same product, and the only difference is the sales tax, which people are aware of in their communities.

Why do legal documents and government notices use legalese instead of wording people can actually understand?

Because regular language isn't as descriptive as it should be to make an agreement with. Agreements typically define things as either A or B, with no empty space in between to meddle over. Think of it as an agreement with Mom and Dad:

When you finish your dinner you will get to play with the Lego or the other toys.

Now, "finish" your "dinner"? Does that mean I have to stop eating, that I have to eat all vegetables or that the plate must be clean? Do I have to lick up the sauce to count as "finished"? If I finish it by feeding it all to Mom, does that count? And then when I do get to play, do I get to play with the Lego and the other toys, or do I have to choose between the Lego on the one side and the other toys on the other? So we go another draft:

When you finish your dinner, meaning that at least 90% of the vegetables by weight and at least 50% of the potatoes and meat are consumed by you, you may play with any or all of your toys at your discretion.

That's a lot closer to the intended meaning but it's a lot harder to read too. Lawyers typically try to close all visible loopholes.

Then there's another problem; your sister gets a slightly different agreement as she was "grandfathered" into the agreement. Your sister wouldn't accept any new agreement and would insist on what she got last time instead, but for you your parents want to tighten the rules a bit more. Putting this in one agreement is a very hard thing for people to do without tightening the rules for your sister or giving you a chance of leeway where you shouldn't get it.

And then there's the consequence if they get it wrong. Somebody could get around paying taxes (saving millions), sell their house and not pay any sales tax on it, pay really little on road maintenance or drive a car that's legally owned by Venezuela so they only pay $0.02 for gas. All of those mean that there's less tax money and those imply that less environment maintenance / war protection / ... will happen. If you ever wonder why schools can look bad or roads aren't maintained? There's just not enough tax money coming in to do all of them...

Why does honey never spoil?

It is so high in sugar that organisms don't have enough moisture to live. The sugar is hydrophilic and will suck the water out of bacteria that encounter it. Basically the same idea behind salting meat, except that uses salt of course.

Why is being Jewish considered an ethnicity?

It is considered an ethnicity because the development of the Jewish religion occurred among a specific group of people, and so as the religion grew, so did the ethnicity associated with the religion. The Jewish ethnicity is defined, therefore, partially by ancestry and partially by religion. The Jewish community also stayed closed off to matches not within the community, preserving their ethnical integrity. That is, until the modern day, where one can be an ethnic Jew, a religious Jew, or both.

How do 3d printed guns work?

Basically it is a tube that holds a normal round. There is a metal firing pin inserted in the tube, this piece is not printed. The first 3d printed gun is only one shot. All the pieces of the gun fit together like a puzzle. This gun is not very effective compared to a regular gun.

If health care costs are much higher in the U.S. than other developed countries, where is all that extra money going?

It is changing, but healthcare corporations are traded on the US stock exchanges, and more often, holding corporations that own numerous hospitals and provider networks. They've been very lucrative stocks up until Obama got elected, often paying more than 10% annual dividend, and the corporations that managed to thrive through acquisitions and mergers returned good profits for several decades in the United States. Some companies that remained in the private hands of wealthy individuals provided excellent spare-no-expense care, while the corporations that get sold off to shareholders usually end up tweaking the staffing and treatment models so that every illness scenario ends up returning the maximum profit for their shareholders, while producing competitive statistics.

It began as a conspiracy by advisers of Nixon, who asked not how Americans could all get affordable healthcare, but rather, asked how can corporations owned by people friendly to their party get the most money from wage earners, and control the money. They invented the system of preferred provider and health management organizations as a subscriber model, thus channeling fixed amounts each month from every worker's paycheck directly to corporate accounts, regardless of an individuals health problems or whether it was the most effective system. Even at the infancy of the industrial healthcare in America, our current situation was never a system evolved at random through free enterprise: it was planned and invented through legislation to ensure the money is funneled through holding corporations and distributed top-down rather than directly at the point of care (i.e. hospitals being run by their own earnings were targeted, bought out with leverage in the asset and turned into cash for investors).

The Nixon tapes have him discussing exactly how to screw over Americans with healthcare legislation. Avoiding giving Americans "free and easy" healthcare was his stated objective, in his backroom dealing.

How can/do animals "smell" fear?

Animals communicate mostly by body language. Your body language when you are afraid is a dead giveaway.

What is a hedge fund and what do they actually do?

WHY THEY EXIST

In order to protect normal people, the SEC has created all sorts of rules and regulations for how companies that invest money on behalf of other people should operate. While this makes the investments safer and less volatile, it prevents the firm making investments from chasing riskier but possibly more profitable investments.

WHAT ARE THEY

Hedge funds are companies that make these investments. They are not allowed to have more than 100 investors, and they are not allowed to take on any investors with less than $5 million in wealth. Many of their clients are either very wealthy people or institutional investors, such as pension funds, banks, insurance companies, college endowments, or sovereign wealth funds. It's also very difficult to get into a good hedge fund, as not only are they limited by the number of investors they can take on, but they are also rated on the rate of return they earn on assets, and the more money you have to invest, the more opportunities you need to find. If someone offers to let you invest in their hedge fund, remember the Groucho Marx joke about not wanting to join a country club that would have him as a member.

GOALS

So in short, hedge funds gather large piles of money from very wealthy institutions and invest it on their behalf. The goal is to do two things. The first is to demonstrate alpha. To explain this concept, think of it this way. If you hear that the stock market went up by 10%, and you look at all the stocks on the market, odds are almost all of them went up. A rising tide lifts all boats. This is referred to as beta. Most assets, or portfolios of assets, will move in the direction of general market. Alpha is finding assets that go up even more than the general market. Anybody can just buy into a fund through say Vanguard, and own the broad market index, and get the above mentioned 10%. People invest in hedge funds to earn an amount above and beyond that 10%. Alpha is supposed to be the ability to find assets that will do this.

The other goal of hedge funds is to earn absolute returns. What this means is that they make money every year, regardless of what the stock market does. A few funds have done this, but 2008 demonstrated that most funds were bluffing in saying they were able to do that, and many of them went out of business.

HOW DO THEY SET IT UP

So based on the above, the hedge fund has a large pile of money, millions or sometimes even billions of dollars, invested with it by various clients. A hedge fund is normally staffed by veterans of the financial services industry, typically people who have worked for a long time at investment banks and have contacts within the industry. After accumulating their investment capital, their frequently turn to investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, or Morgan Stanley, or commercial banks with investment banking arms, such as Citigroup or Bank of America, to borrow large sums of money to leverage this return. What this means if that if you invest $100 and make 10%, you make $10. But if you borrow $900, and invest the full $1,000 and make 10%, you make $100, then pay back the bank $900 (plus interest), and you made $100 (less interest) for your investors off the $100 they invested with you. (The downside of this is that if you lose 10% on your $1,000 investment, you're down to $900, and your investors are wiped out. This is called blowing up in the jargon, and it happens more than you would think, so leverage can bevery dangerous). The banks like to lend to hedge funds though, because they like the interest income, and they like to hear what leads the hedge funds are following (financial services is very incestuous, and rumors drive trades). The hedge funds like to borrow from the banks because, notwithstanding the need for leverage, the investment banks have contacts within the publicly traded companies. Say you're doing a bond offering through Goldman Sachs. Maybe in the process of that, you meet their hedge fund clients, and talk up your business to them to drive demand for your stock, while they hear from the CFO and CEO personally, and make better decisions than the average investor pouring over financial statements.

WHAT DO THEY INVEST IN

OK, so now we have a bunch of guys who used to work for investment banks, with investor money, contacts at investment banks, and large piles of borrowed money. What do they invest in? The short answer is whatever they want. There are a number of recognized investing styles though.

1) Long short - These are the most simple funds. They buy some stocks, and short other stocks. The desire is to assemble a portfolio that will earn both above average and absolute returns. The concept of going long and short, done to hedge risks, is how the industry got its name back in the 1950s.

2) Global Macro - These funds invest in assets that will give them exposure to broad economic forces, which they hope to predict. Do you think the euro is going to break up? Short it, and euro-denominated assets. Do you think we've hit peak oil? Buy oil companies, and oil futures. George Soros became famous for making billions for predicting that England would be forced to devalue its currency in the 1980s.

3) Directional - These tend to be referred to as "black box funds", meaning that no one knows what their criteria are, as it is a trade secret. Often they write computer programs designed to go through millions of pages of data, and analyze all kinds of data to find mispriced assets and go long or short on them. High frequency traders do this with stocks by setting up a computer near a stock exchange that can buy stocks and sell them again within nanoseconds. I also read about a fund that combs through publicly available filings through the Food and Drug Administration, looking for any changes regarding new drugs, to use as information on pharmaceutical stocks.

4) Event Driven Funds - As the name suggests, the buy or sell short assets whose price will be affected by future events. Merger arbitrage is a common form of this. When one company acquires another, usually the buyer's stock goes down, as they are probably overpaying, while the acquired company's stock jumps, as someone is about to overpay for it. Short the predator and buy the prey. In the movie Wall Street, Charlie Sheen uses contacts with a law firm to find clients of the firm who are planning mergers to conduct this sort of strategy, and is arrested when the feds flip one of his accomplices. The most famous example of this strategy is John Paulson, who made billions off the housing bubble buying credit default swaps on collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). The Big Short by Michael Lewis also analyzes funds that took this approach. (I believe Paulson is now following a macro strategy, and has been buying up gold mines, evidence that funds can change strategies).

5) Fund of funds - This is a hedge fund that invests its money in other hedge funds. By diversifying among various funds, the hope is that returns will be less volatile and safer. If one fund blows up and loses all its money, that might be 5% of your investment rather than 100%.

There is a pretty long list of other recognized strategies, many too complicated to worry about here. (For example, the Galleon hedge fund, which was in the news recently, was using contacts in consulting firms and other places to obtain and trade on inside information. The founder is now facing 15 to 19 years in prison. It was an effective strategy, but one that obviously had severe consequences.) But the point of this is to indicate that they can invest in whatever they want, and will be judged solely on how much money it makes.

HOW DO THEY GET PAID

You've probably already heard about how many hedge funds make billions in profits. Hedge funds get paid in two ways. The first is the management fee. If you invest money with a hedge fund (or anyone for that matter), the first thing they do is take a percentage of your money from you and keep it for themselves. Hedge funds typically charge 2% of assets under management each year. They use this money to pay employees, rent office space, and cover overhead until their real payday arrives at the end of the year.

The other means of payment is the performance fee. At the end of the year, the fund tallies how much money it made for investors, and takes a chunk of it for themselves. 20% is typical, but amounts have varied. So if the fund makes $5 billion for its investors, it is a $1 billion payday for the people who run the fund. If you have a lot of money under management, and earn high rates of return, you an become fantastically wealthy very quickly.

PROBLEMS WITH HEDGE FUNDS

One thing you have to hand to hedge funds is that in 2008 and 2009, when investment and commercial banks were all begging for bailouts from the federal government because they were all "to big to fail", thousands of hedge funds died fast and anonymous deaths. Many of them lack the wealth, political connections, and systematic importance to influence the government. If people want to gamble with their money in financial markets, that isn't problematic as long as they are willing to suffer the losses they incur. (It is worth noting that money of them benefited indirectly from the various bank bailouts, and especially the bailout of AIG. Much of the bailout of AIG was to pay off credit default swaps (CDS) on mortgage backed securities, and the proceeds of those CDSs went to certain hedge funds.)

There has been some concern that some of the larger hedge funds could be systematically important, and could cause problems in the future if they place unmitigated bets in financial markets. The Dodd Frank Act made some effort to control them by having them register with the SEC and provide information on their bets to regulators, but as usual the regulation is watered down and many will comply with the letter but not the spirit of the law.

Also, in reviewing the results of most hedge funds, the investors don't seem to be getting a very good deal. First, it's incredibly expensive to pay someone 2% of your money up front and give them 20% of all returns that they earn on the remaining 98% of your money. Many investors would have been better off investing in more conventional vehicles, but the allure of investing in a hedge fund combined with the possibility of outsized returns lures in a lot of people.

The other risk of hedge funds is that they are frauds. Bernie Madoff was running a long short hedge fund, but it was actually a Ponzi scheme. A number of fund of funds were supposed to be diversifying their investor's assets, but were actually just giving it all to Madoff. (It's pretty insulting to pay someone to invest money for you, and give them 2% plus 20%, only to have them dump it all in a Ponzi scheme after performing no due diligence.) Another form of fraud might just be taking on asymmetrical risk. For example if, like AIG, you sell tons of insurance on the housing market, you can pocket a lot of money in the hopes that you never have to pay up on this insurance, and if you do, you just make vague statements about "once in a lifetime" financial calamities.

TL;DR: They are investment vehicles for rich people and institutions that invest in whatever they think will make money. They're supposed to make their investors a lot of money, but they definitely make themselves a lot of money.

What is insider trading and why is it illegal?

It's when you buy or sell stock based on private knowledge. Like if you're a finance guy at Widget Industries, and you knew that Widget Industries was going to report really bad financial results on Friday, so you sold all your stock on Tuesday.

It's illegal because it's massively unfair, it takes advantage of investors, and it leads to moral hazard because company executives could make a killing by tanking their own company. Think about it, it's easy to screw up a company, so why not sell short $100 million of stock and then rake in the cash once the market realizes what you've done? Ugh!!

Becoming a public corporation is a tradeoff. On the one hand, you get easy access to an enormous marketplace for funding. On the other hand, you have certain restrictions, like insider trading. If as a company owner you can't live with the insider trading rules, you stay privately funded. Of course, most private buyouts and contracts include the same sorts of terms (i.e. that if it is found that a company executive misrepresented the worth or value of the company, there are penalties that kick in).

The plot(s) of "Silent Hill".

Somewhere in America, there is a lake, and a town right next to it. It's a very beautiful town and people always liked to go there.

At some point, people noticed that many of the people that came there were bad people who did bad things. There was a lot of killing in the name of made up gods, there were desasters, it was all very bad. And soon the town needed prisons and churches and hospitals for the sick of mind.

Before the town could be destroyed by all the bad people, religion helped to keep them busy and secret, and they wrote down explanations and stories to make sense of it, and this religion became very powerful and influenced everything that happened in the city.

And still the town on the lake was beautiful, and people started to like to go there again. The town build hotels and motels and grew bigger and bigger!

But at the same time, the religious people got crazier and crazier. They felt like this town was special, and they tried to explain why it made people bad, and one day they decided that if they could just capture and use that power, they could turn the town into paradise!

But they were crazy, you see. Just like the religious people many years before that, they thought that the best way to talk to the town was to kill and torture innocent people and offer them to the town as gifts. So they did that a lot. And they tried using drugs to make people look at the town the same way that they did.

One day, a crazy woman and a doctor made a plan: Instead of killing people, they would make a baby, one that would have the power of the town inside of it! And so they did. But it didn't work. The baby girl seemed to be just a normal baby girl, but when she grew up and went to school, the other children didn't like her very much, and called her a witch, and she never had any friends, and only her mother, the crazy woman, to love her. And the girl did love her mother.

And then something terrible happened. The mother and the doctor were frustrated that the girl wasn't as powerful as they wanted. So they decided to kill her, just like the others, in the hopes that this would please the town. They locked her in a house and set her on fire. And then they let the little girl burn, and she burned and suffered terribly!

But she didn't die. And nobody understood why. The girl was locked in the house, burned, in pain, suffering, trying to understand what had happened to her, trapped in her world of misery. The crazy woman and the doctor just left her there, and the only company she had was a nurse the doctor had drugged and forced to look after the little girl.

Did I mention yet how crazy that woman was? The first thing she did after trying to kill the girl was to convince the doctor to have yet another baby! Maybe it would work this time!

And so they did. But again it didn't work. And then something happened that they didn't intend: The nurse, scared that they would burn the second child also, took the baby away! And she drove away from that town, and left it somewhere for someone, someone normal, to find. Nobody knows what happened to the nurse, but they say the doctor found her, or she came back to him because of the drugs, and he killed her. Someone did find the girl. A young man, whose wife had died, found the little girl and adopted her.

And for seven years, they lived a happy life. And he loved her very much.

Until one day, the man decided to take his daughter for a holiday. He put her in the back seat, and they drove to what the man has heard was a beautiful holiday resort. The very town his daughter had come from: Silent Hill.

This is where the first game begins.

Why can I remember some dreams very vividly for a long time, and others I forget within a minute of waking up?

Dreams are more difficult to remember than regular life events because we have a weaker sense of self in our dreams. Because of the principle of encoding specificity that weaker sense of self will give you less to work with when you try to construct your memory. This explains why dreams in which you are more lucid, are easier to remember. The emotional salience of events in the dream are more connected to aspects of your personality. This gives you more triggers to locate the memory. Said another way, you're simply more you in the dream and things that happen to you are stored in ways that you know how to retrieve, not in the ways that some ephemeral semi-you likes to store things.

Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and is almost 12,000,000,000 miles away from Earth, yet we still receive data transmissions from it. How?

The probe has a nuclear power pile and a radio transmitter. We have radio telescope dishes that are sensitive enough to receive radio information from the distant parts of the universe, so even a 12-billion mile distant radio signal is enough to be received by such dishes.

What's the difference between the 'park' in an automatic transmission vs using the hand brake?

The brake puts a brake on the wheels, like you intuitively expect.

"Park" actually just drives a metal post through your gearbox so the gears can't move. Since the default setup on automatic transmissions at rest is for the gearbox to be connected to the wheels, this should stop anything moving.

This is why, when you put on the parking brake, the car doesn't move when you let off the normal brake. But when you let off the normal brake after putting it in park, it lurches a few inches down the hill as all the slack in the drive train gets caught up [the same mechanism as drive lash].

You should use both. If nothing else, than because the odds of both failing is infinitesimally small, while the odds of one failing is slightly less infinitesimally small.

As has been pointed out a couple times, there's other good reasons for using both:

• Putting the handbrake on before the lash is absorbed puts less stress on the drive train and transmission.
• It's designed to hold your car while it's parked, that's what it's purpose is.
• Apparently some cars use it to automatically adjust the main brakes

The Turkish Protests in June 2013

To understand why the protests are happening, you need to understand some of the history of Turkey as a nation, and the Ottoman Empire before it. To understand the Ottoman Empire, you need to understand the Islamic concept of a caliphate. So, here goes:

In the Islamic world, there has always been the concept of a "caliph," which in Arabic means "successor"– a successor to Muhammad. Sometimes, people think of a caliph like a "Muslim Pope," which isn't really accurate. The concept of a caliphate and a caliph isn't tied to any particular region. Instead, the idea is that the Caliph represents all Muslims, and has the authority to speak for them. In the most basic terms, it's a symbol of where power in the Islamic world rests at any given time.

Here's where the Ottoman Empire comes in. As one of the most powerful states in the world for a few centuries, it was natural that the Caliphate was based in Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, for most of that time. It's for this reason that the Ottoman Empire is often considered the fourth (and last) caliphate.

Now comes Turkey. After World War I, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and the war's victors were already circling like vultures, ready to pick apart Ottoman territory. However, there was a guy named Mustafa Kemal (or Ataturk, meaning father of all Turks)– he is basically the George Washington of Turkey, and it was with his leadership that Turkey managed to survive as a single state. Here's the catch: Ataturk also established a strong tradition of secularism in the Turkish state, and he abolished the caliphate.

Ataturk had seen how a reliance on Islamic thought had stifled the technological advancement of the once-great Ottoman Empire. He felt that to adequately "westernize" Turkey, he had to do away with the state religion. This choice upset a lot of people, and still does. The current reigning party in Turkey comes from strongly Islamic roots, which also rubs people the wrong way– it seems to fly in the face of Ataturk's memory. Much of Turkish political history since then can be viewed as the struggle between Western secularism and the Islamic thought of the Ottomans.

Given everything I've just told you, it should make a lot more sense why people got so mad about the bulldozing of a park to put up a replica Ottoman barracks– a symbol of Islamic military might. True, there was also a shopping mall, but ask any Turk, and they will tell you: the protests are about much more than a shopping mall. They are about the Turkish people's right to secularism, and about their right not to be swaddled in state-sponsored Islam.

tl;dr: The Ottoman Empire was Islamic, Ataturk made sure that Turkey was definitely not. The conflict is about bulldozing a public park to put up an Ottoman barracks, a symbol with strong Islamic connotations. Also, shopping malls.

Why does eating fiber help make you 'regular'?

Fiber is a long polysaccharide chain (made up of a lot of sugars) but it is one that our body doesn't have enzymes to digest. When it passes through the intestines it scrapes the lining and stimulates the release of mucus.

The mucus acts as a lubricant as well helps the feces from overly drying out.

As mentioned in the other comments it also helps the feces form into large pieces. Allowing you to defecate the fecal matter in a singular, cleaner stool.

Why doesn't America have a nation-wide railway system like most European countries?

It does already have a large freight network.

But regarding passengers, it can't do so because there isn't enough population density. Most of the population in the US is concentrated near the coasts, so it's not as cost effective.

Also, due to incredibly cheap oil and the growth of the American suburban culture that grew developed after WW2, American's developed their road network more than their rail network.

Everyone wanted to own a larger suburban home and live in less dense areas. This means that everyone needs to own a car. And once everyone is driving, the focus on infrastructure is on roads.

Why time seems to flow at different speeds.

You could think of it as your mind having two gears - high and low. In low gear, you run on auto-pilot, do things automatically without thinking, exert little effort, and are generally more relaxed. In high gear, you are actively focused, embrace some stress and effort, and are generally working harder.

Time feels as though it moves more quickly in low gear (which we engage more readily while having fun - relaxing with a familiar game or tv show). We're not paying as much attention, we are not as focused. When we "tune in" time has slipped by without us noticing as much, and we experience this as time moving faster.

Time feels slower in high gear (which we engage while learning new tasks, or doing hard things that require effort like writing papers). We're really engaged in what we're doing and can readily remember all the hard work we've been through. The amount of "stuff" we've done over time as we reflect on it seems like more because we were "tuned in" for a lot of troublesome details. Time has been taxing and we experience this as it moving slower.

Hope this made sense! (somewhat weak) source: I do a healthy amount of recreational reading on psychology.

Note: you can be tuned out while doing work ("I have some mindless work to do at my job and it makes the time pass faster.") Naturally, there are exceptions to everything.

Why do we swing our arms when we walk/run?

Humans walk by falling forward and repeatedly catching ourselves before we hit the ground. But when we land on our left foot, we start to tip to the right and vice versa, so we swing our arms to keep our balance centered over the middle of our bodies.

What is usenet and why should i be using it rather than torrents?

Okay, so you already know how torrents work. Everybody shares little bits. You download some and share them, and eventually everybody has a copy. It's free. It can be very slow or very fast, depending on the popularity of a particular torrent file. It can be risky.

Let's change hats and talk about Usenet. I upload a file to a Usenet service (that I pay for) and it is shared among thousands of Usenet servers all over the world. Other users (that pay for their Usenet access) can download the file millions of times. It can be extremely fast, but you have to pay for it.

Free Usenet access used to come with your ISP, but most of them have done away with that. Either that or you could get a free introductory (slow, limited) access through a paid provider, just enough so that you would get hooked and buy more access. Nowadays, most everybody has to pay.

I have had a paid access to a Usenet service for about 12-13 years now. Mine is around $100 a year. I make use of it, although I use it less and less now. It used to have bandwidth caps, meaning you could only download maybe 1 movie a day. Most paid services have unlimited data now.

Keep in mind that there is a separate group for anything under the sun. (More than 50,000 active newsgroups.) Also, no moderation, so lots and lots of viruses. Be careful.

The advantage is that you have almost no chance of being caught / fined, unless you are one of the people uploading content. And there are ways of masking your identity and IP address so that it is difficult, if not impossible, to be caught. Many Usenet services either don't keep a record of what you download, or they only keep it for like 90 days in case law enforcement wants to look at their download records. I have never heard of anyone getting busted unless they were trying to distribute child porn.

So the newsgroups are divided up into categories, which are further divided so on and so on. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newsgroups. So you might have alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.classical and alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.classic-rock. Your alt.* newsgroups are going to have a lot of file sharing going on... music, photos, movies, porn, games, you name it. Pretty good list at: http://binsearch.info/groups.php?server=2 .

Some Usenet services have browser access. Most do not. You will need a newsreader program. I use Forte Agent.

Why the USA is so concerned about Israel and the well being of the state of Israel?

Think of it like this:

Israel = little Tommy Britain = Mommy USA = Daddy

Now Mommy gave birth to little Tommy right after WWII. Little Tommy is precious to Mommy because little Tommy is a sign of good Mommy can be. Now unfortunately for little Tommy he sent to school with a bunch of kids that weren't too happy with his birth because one of their friends died so he could be born. Now instead of playing it cool and trying to make friends, little Tommy starts boasting about how awesome he is and how Mommy (and subsequently Daddy) are always there to protect him and how much better he is than everyone around him and honestly being kind of a giant douche. Well when the other kids start to get physical in reaction to little Tommy's verbal abuse. Little Tommy goes running home to Mommy crying about the mean bullies who want to beat him up. Well Mommy is all powerful and loving and can't let that happen, but at the same time she herself can't handle something like this; she needs someone more powerful, stronger and better equipped for bullies. So she enlists the help of Daddy. So now anytime Little Tommy starts to dick around and pisses off the other kids and they start to fight. Little Tommy runs to Daddy and Daddy pulls out his big stick (TR reference NOT a penis joke.) and starts waving it at the other kids threatening to whoop their ass even though it's his and Mommy's little shit that is starting all the problems.

There you go a simple version of relations in the middle east. While there is wrong doing on both sides of the argument it is my firm belief that Israel starts more shit than they need too and just run to the US because they can. Also something I didn't throw in their is guilt for the Holocaust. But that can be more or less debated.

Why is the order of operations in the order that it is?

It's because of polynomials. Polynomials want to be written (5 * (x³ )) + (3 * (x² )) + (4 * x) + 1.

Notice that this has a lot, a lot, of parentheses. Around the time that this notation was getting formalized, polynomials and their properties were considered the most important use of algebra. Over time people got lazy, and stopped writing the parentheses at all, but everyone knew what was meant. This eventually became formalized as an "order of operations."

Allowing us to write 5x³ + 3x² + 4x + 1, the very compact and modern notation, and everyone knows that the exponent applies to the x (and not the coefficient) and that you multiply each term before you add them together.

What makes a person right or left handed? Why are there so many more right handed people than left handed?

We don't know, is the only real answer. In fact, scientists don't even have a scientific definition of what it means to be left-handed. (Is it the hand which can perform a task better? Or the hand you prefer to use for a task?)

There are several theories, and it's probably a combination of all of them. They include:

• Correlation with the way the brain is organised (in right-handed people, the left side of the brain deals with speech as well as with controlling the right hand, and the theory is that speech and fine motor skills are related, whereas the brains of left-handed people are often organised differently)
• The position of the foetus in the womb, especially in the last trimester of pregnancy
• A complex tie-in with genetics (two left-handed parents have a 24% chance of having a left-handed baby, compared to the general population which is 10% left-handed)

What was the real root cause of the economic depression/recession of the 2000's?

What it was, is that (at the root of the problem). during the 80's derivatives started to be used in the stock market, these derivatives included the selling of mortgages.

These mortgages (and other loans) would be sold into parts with respective amounts of repayment, due to how much of the loan the one person owned. eventually, lending companies such as Bradford and Bingley thought "if we're just going to sell off our loans unto the stock market, we might as well have no restrictions due to their being no repercussions because we wont own the loan anymore."

So they started handing out loans to people who probably couldn't pay them back, these were called sub-prime mortgages, prime mortgages were ones that were guaranteed the payment back with no default.

Eventually these people didn't pay back their loans, and these derivatives of their mortgage became worthless because, part of nothing is worth nothing.

Due to large banks and investment companies being so highly geared on these sub-primes, they found a large amount of money gone.

So there you go.

Note: I would just like to point out this is a very simplified version. There are a lot of factors that in the end helped this to bring down the whole market, but this was one of the driving factors. I just didn't want anyone to look at this and take it as the entire truth and only reason of why.

What is Apple doing to avoid paying tax?

Ask: I've read lots on how Apple have Irish subsidiaries and stateless profit sinks etc. but how does it all actually work? And is what they're doing immoral? Or are they simply paying the right amount of taxes for each individual country they operate in?

An explanation specific to the methods Apple uses would be brilliant. It's been difficult getting my head wrapped around this thing.

Answer: While I can't outline specifics, the general gist is this;

Companies pay taxes on profits(revenue-costs). If you want to pay less taxes, you have to reduce your profits. One way to do that is by hiring a company that you own to do some work, that (basically) transfers your profit to a different jurisdiction where it is subject to less taxes.

Say you had $1,000,000 profit and the US wanted to charge 35% in taxes. If you kept everything in the US you'd pay 350,000 in taxes. However, Ireland only has a 10% tax rate, so you buy a company in Ireland and then hire them to do "consulting" for the US company for $500,000. Now you only have 500,000 in profits in the US so you pay $175,000, but you have 500,000 in profits in Ireland which takes 50,000. For a total of 225,000

So, at the end of the day, by doing some fancy accounting you managed to drop your tax rate from 35% to ~22%. Do this in more extreme ways and you can drop it even lower.

How do computer networks work?

Every computer on a network needs to have a unique identifying number, which is the IP (Internet Protocol) address. Actually, the IP address isn't the address of the computer itself, but rather the address of the computer's network interface.

A router is a device that connects computers to each other. As such, it has lots of interfaces (sockets) into which you can plug a network cable. The outside internet connection will have an IP address allocated to it by the ISP, and all the internal network connections will have their IP addresses allocated to them by the router. Certain ranges of IP addresses are reserved for internal networks, and one such range starts with 192.168 - so your outside IP address may be something like 1.2.3.4, your router's internal IP address may be something like 192.168.0.1, and your router will allocate IP addresses to the devices on your network, maybe 192.168.0.2 for the PC, 192.168.0.3 for your phone, 192.168.0.4 for your XBox and so on.

The router's main job is to "route" traffic around the network. It knows if a request for a web page has come from your PC it'll route the reply back to your PC. If the request for something else (game data for example) has come from the XBox, the reply goes to the XBox.

"Port Forwarding" is the process of telling your router to send specific traffic to a particular device on your network. So if you're running a game server on your PC on port 23456, you need to tell the router to send all data on that port to your PC and not to any of the other devices.

LAN just stands for Local Area Network, which is the sort of setup I've described above. The opposite is WAN (Wide Area Network) which kinda works the same way but some of the devices will be further away from the router (in an office building on the other side of town, for example).

How does the human body suddenly become allergic to a certain type of food, after years of eating it without any problems?

Ask: A relative of mine used to eat shrimps, crabs etc. almost weekly for years. Now he's suddenly allergic to that type of food and can't eat anything related to that without suffering from allergic reactions.

Why and how does this happen?

Answer: Shellfish are somewhat of a special case. They're basically living filters, and they soak up the animals and chemicals around them. There are very few people with a genuine allergy to shellfish; rather, they're allergic to what the shellfish have been eating.

This is why you might eat shrimp for 30 years and suddenly blow up like a balloon, out of the blue. Chances are good that if he ate shrimp from a different location, he would be just fine. However, once you experience a negative reaction to a food, it's very easy to get caught up in the psychological response associated with getting sick. He probably has no interest in eating shrimp at this point and would manage to feel genuinely sick even if he isn't really allergic.

The difference between meaning, reality and truth.

Reality is the world or state of things as they actually exist, independent of any idealistic or notional idea of them.

Truth is that which corresponds to reality.

Meaning is a relationship stated in a context. What's the meaning of water? To a thirsty man, water means life. To a drowning man, water means death. To Vegas tourists in front of the Bellagio, water means entertainment (as well as refreshment, if they're carrying water as they should).

Take this statement for example: "A tidder is an invisible creature that makes you mistype things on the keyboard."

Is that statement true or false? In other words, does it correspond to reality or not? We could go in lots of directions, such as getting tidder believers in fights with atidderists, but this wouldn't accomplish much.

The ultimate problem here is that the statement never identifies to what part of reality it is supposed to compare. No relationship to reality is given, so it's simply a statement without meaning.

If you can't even identify meaning, then you can't begin to investigate whether something corresponds to reality. In other words, you can't determine whether the statement has any truth. It is simply meaningless.

Explanation of UK Politics

It's a bit of a vague question, but I'll have a go. Parliament is basically our Congress, and we have MP's (Members of Parliament) who represent the counties within the UK, they are voted for a minimum of every 5 years or sooner, if the Prime Minister calls an election before then.

For the majority of recent years, we have had 3 main political parties, the Conservative Party, Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats. The two biggest are Conservative and Labour, and they usually get the majority of seats in Parliament, except during the last election, where neither did, and the Conservatives did a deal with the Lib Dems to form a coalition government, which is what we have now.

During the reign of the Coalition, a 'new' (as far as the media is concerned) party has come into the public eye called UKIP, whose main policy is to remove us from Europe, and become tougher on immigration etc. There are lots of articles on this because it threatens the Conservative Party and there are lots of members who expressed racist and discriminatory views before joining UKIP, despite UKIP protesting that despite bring anti-immigration, they are not racist or discriminatory.

David Cameron - Conservative Party Leader and Prime Minister Nick Clegg - Lib Dem Leader and deputy Prime Minister (Due to the Coalition) Ed Miliband - Labour Leader (Currently Leading Polls) Conservative Party - Our Right-Wing Party, still further Left than the Democrat Party Labour Party - The Trade Union's party, further left than conservatives Lib Dem Party - lied to get into power, furthest left and smallest of the big 3 UKIP - Anti-Europe, further right than Conservatives.

A few extra notes for the colonials:

• Rather than electing a President separately, the Prime Minister is selected from the House of Commons and is not subject to election (other than as an MP)
• Technically, the Crown has to appoint a Prime Minister and give assent to all laws. However, actually exercising discretion in such matters would quickly lead to the UK becoming a republic, so the Crown functions as a rubber stamp.

What's the difference between fancying someone and being in love?

Fancying someone is what happens when you meet. It's largely superficial - you might like their looks, or you might like what you see of their personality. But you don't really know the person.

Being in love is what happens when you know the person. Their looks no longer matter. Their personality certainly matters - but not the personality they show when you they first meet people, the one you fancied. By now you know their real personality, the one that comes out when they come home after a long day and don't want to socialise, but being with you isn't socialising, it's just part of life. When you know this hidden person, and still "fancy" him/her just as much, you're a fair way towards being in love.

Why do houses in Tornado Alley rarely have basements?

The type of ground in the area is red clay, which is extremely hard to dig through. This makes it very very costly to dig basements, especially for large buildings like apartments and schools.

Sad as it is, the cost is so high as to be prohibitive when it comes to tornado emergency shelters. Tornadoes are rare, short-lived, and almost never as destructive as the one from yesterday. Most large buildings are built to withstand up to an EF3, which protects against most tornadoes.

Another point is basements are (sort of) a requirement in cold climates such as your own, or here in Canada, where the foundation needs to be below the frost line to avoid having the building shift and eventually collapse as the ground freezes and thaws over the years. Since you have to dig that deep anyway, there's no reason not to use the space you're excavating as an extra floor below the ground level - a basement.

In warmer climates, a basement is entirely optional. You can save a lot of money by skipping it, and also some potential annoyance with flooding as well. So it's a lot less common.

Why our bodies can't regenerate cells infinitely?

Answer:

At the ending of our DNA there is a bit that holds it together called 'telomere'. It's like this plastic thing at the end of shoelace. When cell multiplies, the bit gets shorter and when it's too short the cell dies. It acts like a clock, allowing only certain amount of multiplications.

There are some animals that can regenerate it, but in humans a cell that doesn't die becomes cancerous. Cancer is not fun.

Fun fact: scientists managed to take cancer cells (google HeLa cell line for more info) from a patient and breed them in a lab. Patient died in 1950's, but the cancer is still alive and is used in drug research. It is considered immortal.