English Conversation Course

For most of human history, diamonds have been the ultimate luxury item. Useful, beautiful, hard to come by, and impossible to recreate. Most of them formed a billion or more years ago, deep in the Earth's mantle. Way down there, the pressure and heat are just right to crystallize carbon into diamond instead of graphite. It's that crystalline structure that gives diamonds their unique durability. They shot to the surface long ago by volcanic eruptions, and the abrupt drop in temperature locked all those bonds into place forever. Diamonds are dramatic and improbable, so they're immensely valuable. Except, that part about being impossible to recreate, it's not true anymore. Historically, the diamond industry has a lot to answer for. It operated like a large, price-fixing cartel for most of the 20th century. It's implicated in horrifying conflicts in Africa, and elsewhere. And it's done significant environmental damage. This we know. But these day

I'm pretty much sure that most of you heard about marijuana legalization in Canada a while ago ( link ) and maybe you also heard how quickly all the stores run out of it  run out of it. So, at the moment - Canada is the second country in the world (after Uruguay) that legalized recreational cannabis . But still, there a few types (or I would rather say groups) of people with their thought about that topic: - those who support legalization - those who are against it - and as usually - those who don't care at all Everyone has their argument ready to discuss. But there is no compromise at the end of the day. Please, check out those videos by Kurzgesagt and PsychedSubstance and answer questions below What is your opinion about weed legalization? Should it be legal only for medical purposes or completely free to everyone as alcohol is? Or should it be completely banned? How do you think - is weed consumption can result in willing to use somethin

How to be a douchebag on the internet Substantive discussion is hard. Even harder on the internet. Though having access to nearly infinite amount of resources on every topic, discussions there are mostly just garbage. So why should we make any difference. It is always better to adapt than to try change anything. I’ll show you some examples how we can master being a douchebag without being accused of lying or trolling. The most important thing we are going to learn is called logical fallacy. In a few simple words: it’s bending argumentations for our needs and  delivering them with a conviction that makes them sound as though they are proven facts. This technique is often used in public conversations, and as you can guess it is often used by politicians.  In order to be able to use it smoothly we need to reconcile that it is manipulation and of course, we can use it even without knowing. Most of us does. But imagine how effective you can be knowing these tips in everyday life.

This is about  The True Science of Parallel Universes. Maybe someone hear about this.   Questions What do you think about parallel universes? Did you think that this can be true? Would you like to be in a parallel universe, what you will do there?

Wipe server or the beginning of the end of the world in MMO? Who do not know MMO is Massively multiplayer online. Everyone who played MMO could face such a problem as the entire servers wipe. This moment everyone felt his own way. After all, when they clean up the server, people will lose all their stuff and characters, then they will have to start all over again. When admins warn about this event, about a couple of days before the start of the wipe, then all the fun begins. At this moment some people go in different ways. Someone comes into a rage, others panicking and there are those to whom this is all indifferent. From the outside, it all looks pretty similar to how the end of the world might have passed in reality. Each game has this end differently. For example, in WoW, after people are divided into these groups, they decide what to do next, because within a week the end of their work in leveling the characters will pass, and yet not everyone has done everything h

So… what are Visual effects? Visual Effects are computer generated images applied to a video material already recorded. This kind of effects can’t be done during recording but they have to be carefully planned before shooting.  Visual Effects and Special Effects. Special effects are the kind of effects that are performed on the set, while visual effects are done after the recordings are finished. There are two types of effects. -Optical Effects which are done by the play of the light and camera which in turn will make your scene look different than what it looks like to the naked eye. -Mechanical effects consists of plenty of elements that have to be performed on a set and their­ role is to convince the viewer of being real phenomena. Propably most of the weather coditions you have seen in movies were  part of mechanical effects. For example the rain stream can be easily created and controlled to fall in a specific area.  That way it is much easier to work for a whol

There are some weird albums. Probably a lot of them. But not many divide people that way as this one. I think with this one there are equal amount of people thinking this is garbage as it is a masterpiece. For me it can be both: awfully sounding garbage while still being something valuable that has introduced something new, that could inspire more people. 1. Do you know any other bands/albums that are also so progressive or pushed music forward? 2. Would you try listening to that album? Do you see any reason for existing something like that or it is just pure nonsense? 3. What might be the reason for creating such an album these days?

A man from video below is called Idriz Zogaj. Currently he is a coach of the Swedish national memory team. He coached many of the best memory  athletes in the world  and was  Swedens best memory five consecutiv e   year, 2004-2008. Questions: 1. How good is your memory and do you think it is imporant to have a good memory nowadays? 2. Have you ever used any of remembering techniques from this video and what do you think about them? 3. Would you like to improve your memory?

We’ve been talking a lot about AI and its future and yet we didn’t discuss what it is exactly. Here, I would like to briefly present one of the most impressive tools of Artificial Intelligence - neural networks. Shortly, neural network is mathematical function consisting of matrices which takes an input, usually it is set of features e.g. pixels of an image, and than by means of various mathematical operations on the input and those matrices the network generates a result. One matrix inside of a net can be referred as a layer. Despite that neural nets were invented back in 1960s they were not that popular due to their massive computational consumption. Pic 1. Brain activity. After almost half of a century they become extremely famous and all thanks to GPU(graphics processing unit). As it is well known, GPU is used for different graphical tasks like image/video rendering due to its parallel processing architecture. In other words GPU is able to perform multiple calculations

]When I was in the school, my favorite subject was physics, because only this subject was answering all my questions about life. What is lighting, what is electricity, how does TV work ? Even though I always had troubles with mathematics. To be honest I still have. The reason was simple, I didn’t understand what was the use of that subject. All this functions, integrals, matrices. How can it be helpful in real life? Later in the university I started realizing it. What did you think of math when you were at school ,what was your progress ? Do you agree with Eddie Woo that math is everywhere ? Have you ever thought of how all of those rules of life were made, or by whom ?