Here are some notes on the water cycle:
Precipitation & flow: “whether they are typhoons or Scotch mists, mountain torrents or field ditches or city sewers, they are simply water sinking back to base level, the sea.”
Evaporation = the act of passively presenting water to the atmosphere to be soaked up + vaporized by the sun’s energy.
Transpiration= evaporation thru plants
Let me start by saying that if you're healthy and are eating a good balanced diet, there should be no need for you to take supplements. I also want to emphasize that the best way of meeting your body's needs for certain vitamins and minerals is to get them from food. In some cases, for one reason or another, this may not be possible. For example, as a (mostly) vegan, I take iron and B12 supplements, to make up for these deficiencies in my diet. Elderly adults with small appetites may also find it hard to get all the nutrients they need from their diet.
There hasn't been a lot of research into the effects of herbs and spices on cognition and the brain, unfortunately. But on the positive side, the risk of side-effects is very low, so we don't need a lot of evidence for it to be worth trying.
A new book, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
To use a strategy effectively, you need to understand why it works, how it works, when it works and when it doesn’t.
For example, all students take notes — not everyone knows how to do it well. Research into the effectiveness of note-taking has found — surprise, surprise — that sometimes note-taking helps you remember information, and sometimes it doesn’t1.
A lot of theories have been thrown up over the years as to what we need sleep for (to keep us wandering out of our caves and being eaten by sabertooth tigers, is one of the more entertaining possibilities), but noone has yet been able to point to a specific function of the sleep state that would explain why we have it and why we need so much of it.
Transfer refers to the ability to extend (transfer) learning from one situation to another. For example, knowing how to play the piano doesn’t (I assume) help you play the tuba, but presumably is a great help if you decide to take up the harpsichord or organ. Similarly, I’ve found my knowledge of Latin and French a great help in learning Spanish, but no help at all in learning Japanese.
Difficulty in remembering people’s names is one of the most common memory tasks that people wish to be better at. And the reason for this is not that their memory is poor, but because it is so embarrassing when their memory lets them down.
This isn’t just an issue at a personal level. It’s a particular issue for anyone who has to deal with a lot of people, many of whom they will see at infrequent intervals. Nothing makes a person — a client, a customer, a student — feel more valued than being remembered.
Consider our facts about blood:
We could, as is often advised, simply turn these into why questions. And we can answer these on the basis of the connections we’ve already made:
Because they need to accommodate changes in pressure
Because they need to accommodate high pressure
You may have heard of “g”. It’s the closest we’ve come to that elusive attribute known as “intelligence”, but it is in fact a psychometric construct, that is, we surmise its presence from the way in which scores on various cognitive tests positively correlate.
In other words, we don’t really know what it is (hence the fact it is called “g”, rather than something more intelligible), and in fact, it is wrong to think of it as a thing. What it is, is a manifestation of some property or properties of the brain — and we don’t know what these are.