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.