I
t may simply be a matter of
perspective. After all, one year to a
five-year-old is a significant portion of
their lifetime to date, yet to a
60-year-old it is just a tiny fraction.
Other experts say it has more to do
with how, the older we get, the more
familiar life becomes, and the more
we ‘chunk’ our experiences into basic
categories like ‘work’, ‘commuting’,
‘shopping’ and ‘home life’. One study
found that prompting people to
categorise the previous year in this
way led them to feel that it had
passed more quickly. The good news
is that this also points to an antidote- being mindful and savouring each
experience as if it were new ought to
trigger the sensation of time passing
more slowly.
Why does time seem to go faster as
we get older?
Edward Ndlala, Johannesburg
- AFTER ONE DAY
At the end of the first day,
Facebook and Google have
lost over R5.5 billion in
advertising revenue between
them. Most other businesses
have ground to a halt as well,
since banking, telephone and
mobile phone networks all
rely on the internet to
function. - AFTER A WEEK
The modern power grid relies
on the internet to coordinate
power plants and electricity
substations. Without it, each
country’s national grid has
become unbalanced, and
local outages escalate into a
blackout for most of the
world. Gas pipelines have
shut down, since they rely on
power and the internet. - AFTER A MONTH
Petrol stations use electricity
to pump fuel, and they need
an internet connection to
monitor tank levels, process
transactions, and order new
deliveries. Without fuel,
supermarkets can’t deliver
food, and riots rage around
all the major distribution
depots. The army is called in,
but they need fuel and
supplies too. - AFTER A YEAR
In the developed world, most
countries have recreated a
basic landline telephone
network, and have begun to
rebuild society. Everywhere
else has reverted to an
agrarian subsistence economy.
The death toll from starvation,
cold and unrest is estimated
at a billion worldwide. The
global economy is back to
1930s levels.
What would happen if the internet suddenly stopped working?
T
he evidence on this is conflicting. Long-term
studies with large sample sizes have found a
correlation between artificial sweeteners and
weight gain, but these tend to rely on diet
questionnaires, which aren’t accurate. They also
can’t say whether, for example, diet drinks make
you fat, or if overweight people are more likely to
drink diet drinks. A 2016 report by health charity
Cochrane evaluated the results of lots of more
rigorous short-term trials and concluded that
artificial sweeteners actually help with weight
loss by replacing sugar calories with non-
calorie alternatives.Can artificial
sweeteners cause
weight gain?
Kerry Petzer, Clarens