The Pragmatic Lair

Surely you've ever heard someone say, “Are you cold? Take this drink, it'll warm you up. ” Well, it's really something that has a lot of logic, isn't it? Because, at first, we feel that alcohol burns inside. Drinking alcohol does convey a sensation of heat throughout the body and, because of this, many people believe that drinking alcohol can warm them. But this is not so. In addition to the logic of the feeling we have, this belief is supported by a very nice story of the St. Bernard dogs. Historically, they are known for rescuing lost travelers in the Swiss mountains. Edwin Landseer (1820), in a portrait of one of those scenes, painted a dog with a barrel of liquor hanging around his neck. The popularity of that painting began to associate dogs with alcohol in their collars, apparently, as to help the freezing men and even to cure the common  cold. Since then, the idea has leaked into popular culture. The dog's story also helped the myth spread, but this story is...

Surely you've heard the phrase: "the poles are melting." Well, first there is a lot to talk about here. On one hand, in the South Pole, we have an icy continent, Antarctica, which does not melt . On the other hand, at the North Pole, we have the Arctic Ocean, where a huge piece of ice is floating. Currents from around the world affect this ice particularly, because it’s not sheltered on the mainland like the ice in Antarctica. This is one of the reasons why Arctic ice changes so much. In summer part of it melts, and in winter it grows. However, in recent decades it has been observed that the amount of ice that remains unmelted, after summer is less and less. It's the heat. These changes are not only happening in the Arctic. In most of the world, the minimum temperature in the cold zones, and the maximum temperature in the heat zones, is expected to continue to increase, especially in the north. The calcullations indicate that if we keep the 1.5 degrees of increas...

Today we are going to clarify some misconceptions about the mind. Surely you know someone who boasts of having a photographic memory. So the next time you see that person, put your hand on his or her shoulder and say, "No, you don't". For someone to have a photographic memory, the memory of that person would have to be like a photograph. They would have to be able to recover that memory at will and examine it in detail. Zooming in on different parts. But it has never been proven that a true photographic memory exists in that way. Surely somebody is already going to say to you: "I meant that I can remember faces easily." Well that isn't photographic memory, that is remembering faces easily. But some people can have eidetic memory. That it sometimes confused with photographic but they are not the same. A person who has eidetic memory can vividly recover images after a few moments of exposure for a short period afterwards without using m...