Delta1212

All of your genes are encoded in the DNA found in the nucleus of every cell in your body.

Keep in mind, that as long as the motion is inertial (that is, nobody accelerates) it is equally valid to say that either person is moving. There is no absolute frame against which you can say "this is the person that is moving and this other one is standing still." To each person, they are the one standing still and the other person is the one moving close to the speed of light, with all attendant effects, and they are both equally correct.

Just a point: The popular conception of testosterone and estrogen as the "male" and "female" hormones responsible for all differences between the sexes is a wild mischaracrerization. They are both present in both sexes and do not do the same thing (or correspondingly opposite thing) for each sex.

Well, what that even means over any kind of distance is somewhat debatable. Relativity of simultaneity makes defining any kind of "universal now" kind of dodgy.

That's not a part of relativity.

The only thing you can really do in a thunderstorm is take shelter. Lying down or squatting really isn't going to do much of anything. If the lightning is coming down close enough that the difference in your height between standing up and lying flat matters, you're probably going to get zapped through the ground anyway.

Where does relativity come in?

That seems like superstition.

The existence of culture is a biological adaptation to a changing environment. It allows for the very rapid adaptation of behavior to novel environments in the span of a single generation. If you say "Discounting the major biological adaptations that allow humanity to survive in most environments, humanity isn't adapted to survive in this environment." Well yes, but if you strip someone of all of their cultural knowledge and technology and drop them in pretty much any environment on Earth, you are going to wind up with a poorly adapted human.

The length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second.

Correct, it was different from today. I'm unsure why you are having trouble accepting that one of those differences is how we define the second. Just because it is mathematically true that that distance is covered in one second at that speed does not make that the definition of a second. I can, similarly, state that a second is 1/60 of the time it takes to travel 1 mile at 60 mph. That is mathematically true, but it is not the definition of a second.

I think it would be useful to have a quick glance at this: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy

Ok, then are there 30 seconds in a minute, 30 minutes in an hour or 24 hours in their day?

Ok, so if there are 60 seconds in a minute, and 60 minutes in an hour, there are 3,600 seconds in an hour. That means there are 86,400 seconds in a 24 hour day on Earth. On our hypothetical planet that takes 48 hours to rotate fully, 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour and 48 hours yields 172,800 seconds per day. It takes twice as long for the planet to complete one day and there are twice as many seconds in the planet's day. Therefore the length of a second is the same on this planet as on Earth.

It's not a trick. Ok, how many seconds are in a minute?

How many minutes are in an hour?

There is not a paradox. It only seems like a paradox because you think that an alien would use the same definition for a second but adjusted for the size and rotational speed of its own planet, and that we would all then confuse an Earth second for an alien second, or else that an alien would look at the previous definition of an Earth second and then apply the rule used to calculated the length of that second to its home world instead of to the Earth in order to figure out how long a second is. This wouldn't happen because we're all aware of how to convert between units and the definition of a second was never "the length of time it takes for the planet you happen to be on at this moment to rotate such that you have travelled 0.288 miles." Regardless, an alien will be perfectly capable of measuring how long it takes for 9,192,631,770 cycles on our cesium clock to take place and if they are using an alien second, they will be able to say "ah, this represents 0.8 seconds" and they will then have a reference to easily convert between Earth seconds and alien seconds because we all agree on how long it takes for that clock to tick. From standing near the North Pole.

This is only true if you choose to use the frame of the sun. If you take into consideration the sun's rotation around the galactic center, then whether we're moving faster during day or night depends on what season it is (where we are in our orbit around the sun). If you take into account our galaxy's movement with respect to the local group... actually, I have no idea what direction we're moving in. Anyway, it's generally easier just to take thing's from Earth's frame.

It'd be about a foot, actually.

Thing is, our units of time (and distance) have largely all be redefined long since they were first set up to have more accurate measures. As has been pointed out, rather than being based on the rotation of the Earth, the second is now based on cycles of a cesium atom, which are very precise and would, incidentally, be the same on any planet or for any sized being. We chose the number of "ticks" on this atomic clock to correspond (roughly) to the length of a second as it was previously defined out of convenience for our own timekeeping, but it would be trivial to communicate "ok, a second is this many ticks of the atomic clock" and have an alien understand exactly how long that is, regardless of how fast its own planet rotates. Similarly, the meter is defined according to the speed of light, which is a constant that everyone, of other planets and different sizes, will agree upon. Therefore communicating what fraction of the distance light travels in the time indicated by the ticking of our universal atomic clock would correctly relay the distance represented by a meter.

Who says it works well? I missed my train by a minute this morning. Maybe it's because my clock measures time in daylight minutes and didn't keep up during the night when time runs faster. Totally not my fault, as I can now explain to my boss.

You seem to think that having the random assortment of cards determined ahead of time somehow changes the probabilities in comparison with having the random assortment determined at the exact moment that it is required. In other words, you could have gotten an Ace if you'd drawn a card a half second earlier, or someone else might not have gotten three Aces in a row if they hasn't drawn at the exact moments that they did. The thing is, this is completely irrelevant. The cards dealt in poker are supposed to be random and this achieves random distribution exactly as well, if not actually better, than physical shuffling of cards. Unless there is some way to intentionally exploit the process in order to change the odds, the simple existence of the system running as it does will have no impact on the game. Yes, some people will get unlucky by an accident of time while others get lucky by the same accident, but the exact same thing happens while playing in reality with some people getting lucky from an accident of shuffling while others lose out. Statistically, they look exactly the same regardless. The important factor is that cards are randomly dealt, not how that randomness is achieved. And by all appearances, the system you've described would result in a random dealing of cards.

The inner track on is "quicker" in a race because you can complete a full circuit in the same time as an outer track while moving at a slower pace. There is less distance to cover, so if you make the loop in the same amount of time, you are moving slower. Or, alternatively, if you move at the same speed, you will finish the loop much sooner since you have less distance to cover. It's not because things in an inner circle naturally move faster.

A year is a defined measure of time. There is no special significance to the number 14 billion as it pertains to the the age of the universe. There is also no particular reason why unit of time should have be the exact length that a year is (other than that it's useful for humans living on Earth for seasonal purposes). That said, just because the definition is arbitrary doesn't make it an invalid reference. As long as the definition is consistent, you can use any arbitrary reference for measurement purposes. 14 billion years is a specifically defined period of time. That period of time corresponds to the age of the universe. There is no particular reason we'd have to measure that length of time in years, but as long as we all agree on the length of a year, there's nothing wrong with measuring it in years. You can measure time in any arbitrarily defined unit you want just so long as that unit has a generally agreed upon definition.

Equate for what?