Houston just can't seem to catch a break. After a band of extreme thunderstorms rampaged through on May 16, knocking out power to large parts of the city, new storms have caused continuing misery there — and, for that matter, large swaths of the Lone Star State and beyond. On Tuesday, May 28, powerful storms pummeled Texas with high winds and baseball-sized hail, tragically causing one death. Houston was not spared: Streets were flooded for the second time in two weeks, and more than 100,000 C ...read more
The French Broad River winds through the mountains of western North Carolina, fed by dozens of mountain streams, and crosses the city of Asheville. At over 2,000 feet above sea level and more than 250 miles from the coast, it is an unlikely place to prepare for a hurricane.Yet, the remnants of several hurricanes have swept through this region over the years, sending rivers in the region raging out of their banks.When these storms hit back to back, the devastation can be enormous. In September 20 ...read more
Plato’s Theory of Forms addresses the question of how we know that an object, such as a table, is what it is, even though we may never have seen it before and even though it might look entirely different to any table we have ever seen. Plato’s answer is that a table gets its “tableness” because it partakes of the perfect Form of a table. This Form is an ideal, absolute, timeless entity that is the essence of tableness but that we cannot experience directly. In his Allegory of the Cave, P ...read more
You’ve heard of diets like the paleo diet, which claim to harken back to the foods of our ancestors, recreating the diets that we would have eaten during the Paleolithic or Stone Age. It’s a reference to eating the way we’re naturally supposed to eat, identifying the foods that are healthiest for human consumption.However, according to experts, these diets present a number of unlikely scenarios. First, early humans didn’t shop at the health foods store or choose foods that best suited th ...read more
You have probably heard of sensory deprivation tanks. A number of celebrities swear by them for relaxation, and they have steadily grown in popularity over the past few decades. They work by minimizing sensory inputs from the external world: The tank is filled with high salinity water that allows the user to float freely on the surface; the water is body temperature; earplugs are worn to reduce sound; and the tank is usually situated in a dark room or enclosed space.The potential therapeutic ben ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine