English Conversation Course

I am big fan of reading, mainly fantastic genre, mainly -- science fiction. My favourite writers are Strugatsky Brothers. They pictured future world, inhabited by dreamers, people, who desire nothing but one very thing -- create. And from that creation rose a new world -- made completely by people, with no harm whatsoever to the nature that gave birth to Life as we know it. Today I wanted to share with you, guys, one of the examples of such creation that I have accidentally stumbled across several years ago -- Orion's Hand. Orion's hand nebula which has inspired the name of the project Orion's Arm (also called the Orion's Arm Universe Project, OAUP, or simply OA and formerly known as the Orion's Arm Worldbuilding Group) is a multi-authored online science fiction world-building project, first established in 2000 by M. Alan Kazlev, Donna Malcolm Hirsekorn, Bernd Helfert and Anders Sandberg and further co-authored by many people s...

Currently there are nine countries in the world that have a total of minimum 13 910 standard issue thermonuclear warheads, of which at least 3 600 are deployed, which means that only a press of a button and approximately 30 minutes of flight (that much it takes for a warhead to reach any part of the planet from any point, tops) separates You or Your home town from being wiped out from existence. See a video below for a very cool informative and illustrative representation of what it must feel to stand right in the ground zero (Spoiler: this is practically the best possible location to be) when nuke detonates. Seeing a video, what is Your opinion about: 1. Nuclear and thermonuclear weapons in general. Can their existence be justified? Are they a necessity? How did we even come up to something? 2. How would You feel if You found out that Your home city is on the target list for strategic objects bombing on a map of some world leader? Mine is :) What would You do about it? 3. Do...

I have always liked watching horror movies, feeling this thrill which was associated with later sleepless nights. I wondered why I still watch them  regardless . I hope that horror film genre has a hidden agenda and we need to find it. I belive that it can provide us with more than just screams of terror when we see a suspicious shape outside the window while we are watching the screening.                                           Questions: 1.What do you think about horror movies? 2.  What is the scariest movie you have ever watched ? 3. Do you think that horror movies can teach us something?

It is the term defining the transfer of human consciousness or its copies, or at least their fragments from the biological brain to an artificial substitute. Many people wonder if there is life after death, but what if we try to avoid our "final destination" and just never die. Scientists and philosophers are still unable to determine exactly what a consciousness  is but more and more indicate that it is closely related to the brain. The human brain contains about 86 billion neurons interconnected by about 100 trillion synapses.  At the moment, no one has been able to transfer human consciousness or its copy to the "artificial" brain for many reasons. One of them is the technological aspect, because current technology does not allow it. The human brain is too complex and complicated.  Apart from the above-mentioned technological aspects, nobody knows what the process will really entail.  If we could make copies of ourselves, what would happe...

Throughout the first half of 21st century Neanderthals were thought to have been primitive, unintelligent hunched-over cavemen. It is as we see them depicted in countless movies and cartoons. Why is that so? Anthropologists’ early impression of Neanderthals was partially influenced by popular ideology at that time that one’s intelligence and humanity can be assessed from skull shape. Many of those scientists also shared a view that evolution is straightforward progress and so Neanderthals must have been much more primitive than nowadays humans. It is also worth mentioning that was a brief period of time between 51,000 and 39,000 years ago when modern humans and Neanderthals coexisted, maybe fought each other and definitely interbred. But at the end of an era only one species left standing. So there should be something wrong with them, right? But as we found more Neanderthal remains and conducted proper analysis the stereotype of Neanderthals being primitive started to...

Music is an incredible carrier for expressing vast spectrum of emotions, feelings and thoughts. Given the variety of music, we all have our preferences and while loving particular songs, genres and artits we despise listening to some of the others. Even with differences in our taste of music, we are mostly able to agree that songs written out of tune sound just bad. But what does make the sound being out of tune or not? Simple answer is "when it does or doesn't sound right", but in different context exactly the same sound can be considered "clean". Just like in the human speech words can be meaningful in one language while being completely gibberish in the others. The same applies to music's sound - it all depends on our "language" - the tuning system. In modern's western music the most popular tuning system, is a twelve-tone equal temperament which divides the octave into 12 parts - semitones. It results with chromatic scale being most common...

Eristic Discussion One of reasons why communication is important part of the living in the society is the value it brings with the exchange of the informations. Since the beginning of the first human's societies, it's been essential for us to gather and exchange vital informations about ourselves and our surroundings. It seems rather easy to communicate when both sides agree with eachother. Problems begin when there is no agreement between them and communication becomes discussion or even a quarrel.  It would be too far going assumption that if someone is right then discussion has to lead to the right solution. Quite often we forget about what is the important reason of the discussion and instead of exchanging facts we try to overcome our interlocutor. In the heat of discussion, instead of seeking for the truth, we let our emotions and our ego take over control which can result in the discussion become eristic. Schopenhauer described 38 stratagems like e...

Dear Students, Vote for the best presentation.   Justify your choice.

Kathryn Bouskill is an American anthropologist and social scientist who gave her TED Talk about the consequences of a fast-paced world in which we live. Some people say that life moves so fast that we have to be careful not to miss it. Turns out that there is a much bigger meaning behind that sentence. Everything is done faster and faster but are our bodies and minds able to keep up with this constantly growing speed? Are we really those "stone agers in the fast lane"? Questions 1: What is your opinion on this topic? Should we slow down? 2: Which lifestyle has more advantages in your opinion? Living slowly in a fast-paced world or always trying not to waste any minute? 3: Name one thing which you wish you could do faster and one which you would love to have more time for. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbnQtb9LUY4

You have probably watched Star Wars movies. Some people hate the new trilogy, some people love it. The reputation of a prequel trilogy has also changed from time to time. But one thing for sure and every Star Wars fan would agree, original trilogy is the best. That’s the one about Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and other famous heroes. Have you watched it? If no – I wont judge, because this movie is from year 1977 and nowadays it looks rather odd. Our generation is now used to see special effects in movies and we rarely think about how they were done, because “it’s probably computer generated”. But that’s not the case for Star Wars original trilogy, back then computers could render literally nothing. Every special effect back then involved some really hard work and a lot of creativity. I encourage you to watch those gentlemen discussing and explaining some special effects from old Star Wars movies: Questions to discuss: 1)    Do you enjoy special e...

In 1965, a co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and a CEO of Intel at the time Gordon Moore published a paper in which he predicted that the number of transistors in microprocessors would double wich each passing year which in turn meant a promise of a continuous increase in performance of the CPUs. But with the time as individual elements of processors were becoming smaller, it became much harder to keep up with this speculation, and by many predictions, it would be almost impossible to achieve the increase in computing performance by the beginning of the next decade. In order to continue to make progress, silicon would have to be replaced by newer and better technology. So what the future of processing hold's for us? The video below explores the problem and possible solutions to it. Questions: 1. Do you think Moore's Law will stop working before the end of the decade? 2. Do you believe quantum computers can help the IT industry to circumvent this challenge? 3. ...

Open-source software as a security-enhancing measure In the modern world, the efficient usage of computers nearly became a necessity on which many people’s livelihood is dependent on. We use it for communication, work, and entertainment all of this while unwittingly using hundreds of programs of which origins we are not even remotely conscious about. What is even worse is that these programs, which we often run on our computers, phones, and other devices like smart fridges and not-so-smart smart toasters tend to have access to the sensitive personal data such as your location logs, data about your bank accounts, your naughty summer vacation photos or basically everything that actually goes in or out of your electronic device. The described situation begs the question: “How can a person be sure that an application he (or she) runs on his (or her) device is trustworthy? ”. It turns out, often case you can’t trust even to the software produced by large and r...