Lava flows approaching Kapoho Bay in the lower East Rift Zone of Hawaii on June 3, 2018. USGS/HVO
The active eruption from Fissure 8 on Kīlauea has now produced a lava flow that is reaching the ocean at Kapoho Bay — across the middle of “Vacationland Hawaii” (see above), another development with many houses. The lava flow is forming a lava delta into Kapoho Bay, extending the land out into the ocean. The lava flow itself is almost 0.8 kilometers wide when it ...read more
The world’s attention has been on Hawaii, but an explosive eruption today in Guatemala has now become the deadliest of the year. At least 6 people died and 20 were injured in an eruption that generated multiple pyroclastic flows and heavy ash fall across the area near Fuego, the Central American country’s most active volcano. Three hundred people living near Fuego have been evacuated as a precaution for more pyroclastic flows. Emergency responders are trying to reach people injured b ...read more
As everyone knows, Roseanne Barr posted a racist tweet. She claimed that the sleeping medication Ambien affected her behavior, but her show got cancelled anyway.
Now, I think this scandal raises some surprisingly interesting philosophical questions about moral responsibility and the nature of self-control. What follows is a dialogue between two hypothetical speakers exploring some of these questions. To be clear, this is a post about philosophy, not about Roseanne. I don’t know or care if ...read more
A closely-related species of long-beaked echidna. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
We all know Schrödinger’s cat, right? It’s a neat thought experiment (and one of the best analogies for quantum physics) but the situation always felt a bit forced to me. When are you really going to find a cat in a box with a radioactive substance and a flask of poison?
So here’s a more realistic version of the quantum analogy, one, in fact, that’s currently playing out in natu ...read more
(Credit: pathdoc/Shutterstock)
Take a second and try to talk about a person without mentioning gender.
If English is your native tongue, odds are you failed. But if you had been born in Indonesia, you might have succeeded.
Lera Boroditsky, who studies language and cognition at the University of California, San Diego, recalled a conversation with a colleague from the Southeast Asian country. He was asking her about someone she knew back in the states, and gender didn’t pop up until questi ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
