Common Sayings

      One of thing you should certainly learn in order to enrich your language are idioms. However, we should pay attention to use them correctly.

      Above is a picture where it is literally raining cats and dogs. The word "literal" has a very clear meaning: "actual or without exaggeration." Yet, it is far too often used to add emphasis to a situation and exaggerate a certain thing that could not possibly be factual: I literally froze to death (Then how is it you are alive and able to express this nonsense?), My phone is literally blowing up. (Your phone is not a ticking time bomb, or is it? )  The correct word in these and others cases in which you don't really mean literally but figuratively.

   

If you're "taken for granite" that would mean you're mistaken for one of rocks. You should be careful with misspelling. For example: to take something for granted is to assume that you are entitled to it, without question or to simply fail to appreciate its value. Whereas to take something for "granite" can only mean to assume that the person or thing is actually a piece of igneous rock.

I strongly recommend the website where you can find interesting examples for proper use of idioms and not only:  http://grammarist.com/

Trade Secrets We Wish We Knew

Apart from the various advertising gimmicks used by large corporations like special ingredients to make a hamburger looking delicious in advertisements, or yellow colour  in commercials to stimulate your appetite. 

Every company takes part in a rat race to get the highest amount of consumers. They promises a better product - a better burger, a better search engine, a better hotel room. For the companies below, the secret to a superior product is worth millions, or even billions.

Now let's take a look at some trade secrets, that are worth a lot of money to the people that own them.

First of all coca cola's secret recipe: it's common knowledge that the world's most famous secret recipe once contained cocaine; what's less known is that Coke still uses a coca leaf extract made by the Stepan Company, the only company in the U.S. that is allowed to process cocaine. Coca Cola also admits to using African kola nuts, lime extract and vanilla, and various reports suggest other exotic ingredients, including lemon extract, orange extract, nutmeg and neroli. The true recipe remains a mystery. Unfortunately, the decision to avoid a patent didn't protect Coke from two of its own employees who tried to sell the formula to Pepsi. Luckily, they were turned in by Coke's competitor.

Secondly, the trade secrets we know little about, but are worth billions. It is a Google's proprietary search algorithm, which helped it achieve dominance over the Internet.

And the last one- popular chain restaurant, KFC (aka Kentucky Fried Chicken). Sanders created a recipe for a tasty chicken coating about 70 years ago that contained 11 herbs and spices. That same recipe is still used today.  His original, handwritten copy is hidden in a safe in Kentucky, and only a few select employees, bound by a confidentiality contract, know what the recipe is.

beer belly

We know beer is pretty calorific, as are the snacks we crave to accompany it.
But why does it specifically affect men’s guts? Greg Foot explains all.

When you drink beer, your liver has to go into overdrive to detoxify the alcohol. Now add a few packets of crisps to the equation, maybe some peanuts and those calories are there to stay. Beer itself is pretty calorific stuff, to the tune of around 150 calories a unit so why beer makes you fat, well that starts to seem obvious.

Now why does it give you a beer belly specifically? Well the answer is down to two things apparently - gender and age. After about the age of 35 most men's metabolisms start to slow down. While men tend to put weight on their... bellies, women's fat stores commonly go on their backside and hips.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRx5MhNqWvc

contact lens and diabetes

Google has announced it's testing a smart contact lens that
can help measure glucose levels in tears.

The contacts contain a tiny wireless chip and a sensor.
The company is hoping the technology could lead to a new way
of helping people with diabetes manage their disease.

If this invention can help people who suffer from diabetes, why not?
More about that topic:
http://news.yahoo.com/google-contact-lens-could-option-diabetics-062656935.html

Can music make you smarter?

In my last post I wrote about a scientific experiment which concerned true and false beliefs.
In this one I would like spot another, namely research on music.

Can music make you smarter?
This is a question which we need to answer.
You have probably heard of the Mozart effect. It’s the idea that if children or even babies listen to music composed by Mozart they will become more intelligent. A quick internet search reveals plenty of products to assist you in the task.
The students who listened to Mozart did better at tasks where they had to create shapes in their minds. For a short time the students were better at spatial tasks where they had to look at folded up pieces of paper with cuts in them and to predict how they would appear when unfolded. But unfortunately, as the authors make clear at the time, this effect lasts for about fifteen minutes. So it’s hardly going to bring you a lifetime of enhanced intelligence.

In that video James May delves into the mysteries of music in his own inimitable way:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8zU7PyUrdU

The puppet show and our minds

What connects two distant things from the title?

              Psychologists can use dolls to reveal how we judge true and false beliefs in the world around us. Yet not everybody has this talent. as Jason G Goldman discovers.

In a scientific experiment, children were invited to watch a scene featuring two dolls, then asked make a decision about what they saw – see if you make the same choice as they did.

A puppet-doll called Sally, who has a marble (a ball). She places it into a basket, and then leaves the room. Next, another doll, Anne, steals the marble from Sally's basket, and moves it into her own. Sally returns, without known about Anne's trickery.

If you watched this EXPERIMENT, where do you think Sally will look for her marble? It seems obvious – her own basket – but not everybody gets the answer right. Some children, and many animals, try to imagine Sally’s perspective.

This talent is a signature of “theory of mind” – an ability I have been exploring in my previous two columns, on deception and distinguishing intention from happenstance. We share those two simpler forms of mindreading with other animals – but passing the Sally-Anne test requires far more sophisticated thinking.

Why? You must be able to hold two contradictory ideas at once. First, you must know the true state of the world: the marble is in Anne's basket. Second, you must understand Sally's flawed perspective of the world: Sally believes the marble is still in her own basket. In other words, you must simultaneously maintain both a true belief and a false belief in your mind without confusing the two.



Research in the intervening decades has refined that conclusion, but the Sally-Anne task and others like it have been used extensively as a clever method for detecting the more sophisticated forms of theory of mind. Most replications of the Sally-Anne task with typically developing children have found that four-year-old children tend to pass the test, but that younger children usually fail.

New Year's resolutions

Each year comes this time when we all sum up the past year and we creating new list of resolutions. Everybody wants to have better time in the upcoming year. So we find a place where we can sit and reflect, then think about changes and improvements we'd like to make. The most common sacrifices and promises are: to lose weight and get fit, to quit smoking, to learn something new, to eat healthier and diet, to get out of debt and save money, to spend more time with family, to travel to new places, to be less stressed, to drink less. Who has never promised himself even one of these things?  Nobody! all promise to improve themselves, do something for their own sake. Like a necessity imposed from the top.

really nice video by
Dr. Mike Evans- 'New Year's Resolutions' <- click