Good Bye to Everybody

I cannot believe we spent 4 months together and only one week is ahead of us.... Going to education building in the morning and seeing you guys have become my daily life, and I would feel weird to stop the habit of going to ELI and seeing you guys. I believe most of you are heading back to your own country and I am not attending the next section. I always liked Tuesdays because we are in lap, and I felt somewhat special every Tuesdays. And Lap days are over now, I won't have another lap with you guys... haha this makes me very emotional. T_T It was very, really, tremendously nice to meet you guys.. Your English skills are all awesome, and you will have a brighter future thanks to the skills you have learned in Vancouver. I was lucky to have you guys as a classmate.. :)... Hope to contact with you guys in any form; skype, facebook, e-mail, or even hand-written letter. Best wishes for all of you !!!<3

Nathan, I will always miss your not-funny-at-all-jokes (LOL) you always made and your mustache. You helped me greatly in learning English, and not only the skills of English, you also taught about such good  topics and my sight has been broadened by your class. Yet, I don't think the end of this class means the end of our seeing each other because I will keep coming to ELI to meet my friends and CAs, and you! :) Best wishes for you and your beloved wife and cute little kid :D See you around <3

London Riot and Destructors

They both show how cruel the inner heart of human could be. In destructors, they do not have any personal feelings for Mr.Tomas, but they focus on destroying his house completely. No rational human being would understand such behaviors since it is hard to do such hard-labor-taking work even when someone has a deep hatred for the owner of the house. There are lots of photos that make us shocked regarding the London Riot. London is one of the oldest and respected cities in the world. English people are usually considered as "gentlemen". However, the London Riot showed the exact opposite aspect of them. Many  faultless people got hurt, and the old buildings they were proud of got burnt.

In high school, I learnt about the theory that human nature is fundamentally evil persisted by Hobbes. I was not quite the support of this theory, but having read about the Destructors and seeing the photos of London, his theory seems like it gained support. Even the so-called-gentlemen of London could behave like monsters when chance shows up. However, I still wish that the theory of Hobbes is not correct, and that human being has much more decent aspect than evil aspect.

Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory

There are many cognitive traps that obstruct us to think right about happiness. The first trap is that the word happiness is used to refer too many notions; the second is the confusion between experience and memory, and these are both lumped in the notion of happiness; (and I don't understand what the third one meant.)

He focuses on explaining the notions we think are the same, but actually they are very different. Exeperience and memory are indeed two different entities, but we tend to consider them as the same thing. To clarify the difference between experience and memory, the division between the experiencing self and the remembering self is necessary. The experiencing self is the one that lives in present, the very moment we are doing something; on the other hand, the remembering self is the one that remains and maintains, and it is the one that plays much more vital role among two. Lots of things differ in terms of which point of view (self) you use to explain. The purpose of his lecture was to give people some kind of sense how much it is difficult to think straight about well being.

2001 : A Space Odyssey interpretation

This movie is one of the most difficult movies I have ever watched. I believe most of us would agree on this. If I did not watch this movie with my classmates and Nathan, I am pretty positive that I would never have finished the movie, and plus, I would be much more confused than I am now. I was somewhat confused when the movie started, not only because I had to wait for a long time for the title and the theme music to go away, but when the movie did start, the main characters were apes, not human. The title of the movie includes the word 'space', so I expected something about technology, or at least the setting would be in modern days. However, instead, the apes, which I would rather call monkeys, but due to the subtitle 'The Dawn of Man', I should call them apes, appears.(I am not sure if this sentence makes sense) Now I believe that 'The Dawn of Man' part is skillfully made and is absolutely needed for the whole story, but I have to sat that I was quite bewildered that time. I was thrilled to see the scene of the ape throwing the bone, and a space shuttle showing up suddenly. This scene is referred to as one of the most well edited scene, so I have heard about it even though I I had no idea which movie it was. After the apes touched that monolith, they became to know how to use bone as a tool, and after billions of years later, human were able to go to the moon to find another monolith. I am still bit shocked how Stanley Kubrick would come up with this idea that the start of us being scientific was a single use of a bone, and also how he succeed in showing it with a single scene (a bone turns into a space shuttle).

Weirdly, I do not have much impression to the second story. Maybe the first and the last stories were indeed shocking, so relatively the second one was not that memorable. It is somewhat funny because I did not notice that the second story was over when the third story started. I was confused why there became two characters, and a machine called HAL9000. I wonder why Kubrick did not insert subtitles between second and third story.  HAL is considered as the most evolutive machine ever. Dave and Frank, and three scientist who are hibernating are leaving for Jupiter. HAL9000 is considered as the 6th crew of the journey since it is highly intellectual so could possibly be considered as a human being. I think it is quite ironic that in the bible we read in our class, shows that human beings were made on the 6th day of the creation, and in this movie, HAL9000, the creation that human made is considered as the 6th crew of the ship. I think the sequence when Dave turns off the operation of HAL was very memorable. HAL keep talks to Dave to stop doing it, and its voice is very calm and slow as usual. If it were a real human, it should be sound very nervous and shouting to Dave, but instead, it keeps saying "I am dying Dave"  in very calm voice without showing any feeling. I think that this means a machine can never become just like human no matter how much it is developed. 

The movie is very consistent, meaning that the ending of the movie is not easy to understand either. I was baffled when I watched the man grew older on Jupiter. It was not until later that I found out that the man was Dave. It feels like there are two people in the room, but actually it is not. It is just Kubrick's outstanding way of revealing the story in a very extraordinary way. I believe that it is almost impossible to understand what the huge fetus at the ending scene means if we did not know that the movie is inspired by Nietzsche's book 'Thus Spake Zarathustra'. The baby refers to Uebermensch, the new man kind after the present human being. Maybe this was the reason why 'they' sent the monolith to earth in the first place, to create a new man kind. 

I found very interesting and very agreeable statement while I was searching for the video clips. It said : 

The 99.9% of the people who watched this movie in 1968 said "wtf was that?!", 

the 99.8% of people who watched it in 2011 said "wtf was that?!"

Sorry for the language, but I could not agree more! It is definitely true that this movie is difficult to interpret, and even if some do succeed in understanding it, the interpretation differs from person to person!