Would you boil a baby in order to save a million people? Some people would object most likely with shock. Boiling a baby would be morally unacceptable under any circumstances for them. Yet others would justify it for the sake of saving a million lives. This dicey situation introduces us to a concept in ethics …
In her TED Talk titled “How Russia Hacked the US Election”, Laura Galante, a cyber-analyst, stipulates that the rise in digital technology has made the human brain the most exploitable data processing unit in the universe. She argues that digital media exposes people to an unfiltered flow of data that becomes more familiar with time, …
In the words of Phineas T. Barnum, “There is a sucker born every minute”. Barnum was a well-known nineteenth-century American showman hailed for his one-of-a-kind exhibits. People paid a lot of money to witness Barnum’s intriguing spectacles, such as the Cardiff Giant and George Washington’s 161-year-old nanny. While Barnum’s showcases were hoaxes, people would buy …
The use of mythical allusions does not just enrich language but also deepens the meaning of things. Some allusions have been used over and over until they have part and parcel of our day-to-day language. Most of the time we slide them here and there in our writing or speech without knowing we are using …
Have you read a sentence in which the use of a particular word or phrase came across as a proverbial stone cast to kill two birds? Then you have definitely dealt with Syllepsis. These amazing rhetorical devices may make you read the statement twice to confirm whether they make grammatical sense. Surprisingly, the statements pass …
Picture how our modern economy consumes enormous amounts of resources and generates mountain loads of waste each year. How do we defuse this ticking time bomb that one day threatens to lay waste to our planet? Well, many economists think they have figured a way out—it’s called a circular economy. As its name implies, the …
As stipulated in the kinetic molecular theory, solids, liquids, and gases are made up of tiny particles in constant motion. Solids and liquids are in condensed states wherein their particles are close together, thus limiting their range of movement. In contrast, air particles are sparsely packed, allowing them more room for random movement. Gaseous molecules …
Gestalt psychology is founded on the assertion that man envisions patterns in a manner that informs their perceptions of reality. This school of thought holds that people perceive pieces of visual information, such as symbols and shapes, in accordance with their configuration, pattern, or organization. Essentially, the whole pattern is more descriptive than the sum …
We use so many allusions in our pop culture even without realizing it. Allusions are the direct or indirect references we make to something, which could be mythical, historical, religious, or literary. As a literary device, we use allusions to condense a great deal of meaning into a word or phrase. So, the references are …
In game theory, the zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which each participant’s gain or loss of utility is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the utility of the other participants. In other words, whatever one person gains in utility, someone else loses an equal amount. The term “zero-sum …
