Response to the Video"Happiness" on Ted

Daniel introdeces two concepts when we answer the question how happy we are: experiencing self and remembering self. The former one tells us that feeling about present, while the later one keeps the story of our life. And these two selves answer or think distincly to the question about the happiness of life. As experiencing self, it would tink how happy a person is IN the life, whereas remerbering self would think how happpy he/she is about the life.

 My first reaction to the video is that WOW! I've never thought about this when I think how happy I am. I know happiness is about the feeling, but I never know where an how the feeling comes from. However, after I wacting the video, I start to pay attention to those different concepts. I usually would say I am not happy and not unhappy as well. This feeling comes from the experiencing self, because there is not always anything special or exciting happens when I think about happiness of my life.

Besides, I cannot agree more with the statement "We think of our future as anticipated memories". I belive future is based on the past, which is memories. We imagin our future from the past. For example, I would think of my future in UBC is going to be happy, because I am happy in ELI. I see students on cpmpus are with smiles. These memories are the sources to predict my future life. This idea that future is based on the past leads to myagreement with the point that remembering self is the one making decision, because every decision is about the future.

Response to "2001: A Space Odyssey"(Finished)

"2001: A Space Odyssey" is an interesting movie with various themes, implications and meanings, worth a second watch. It indicates a very clear sign of the relationship betwwen humans and tools or mechines and leads us to rethink of the use of that relationship. In the chapter one "The drawn of man", we see a group of monkeys try and fail to take over the water pool as it is controled by another group of monkeys, and  no one gets hurt as both groups are not armed with any tools or weapons. Nevertheless, one group of monkey later discovers that stones of animal are very powerful, then they soon use them as weapons, leading to a viatory of the battle against the other group by killing one enermy monkey. After the chapter one of the movie, it movess from the primative time to the morden time when human explore the outer space. Human, in the chapter 2 and so on, create a highly intelligent and human-like computer "Hal' in terms of emotions. The development of Hal represents another extreme period of utility of tools, compared to the Chapter one when monkeys do not or just start to rely on them. Humans' extreme dependence of Hal creates the tragedy of the story, as Hal is out of control and denies orders from humans, leading to kill human ourselves. Although Hal is acting in his own way and killing humans, David finally succeeds to plug him out of connection to destroy him. David's finally transformation gives us a hope and message that humans can reconsider the relationship of tools and humans and recduce any possibilities that machines will harm back humans, as David has sort of been reborn at the end.



ps. Sorry Nathan, I forgot the blog thing to delay to finish this late

Response to the "Excerpt from Beowulf"

After I read the first part of the aricle, my first response is that, it is such a difficult reading to read with all the old fashion English vocaburary and instict sentence structure. This reminds me the old tradtional Chinese languese which used hundreds or a thousand years ago. By reading the aricles like this, we can see how the use of languag has changed and how modern language is inherited from old one. For example, in the aricle it says "Went he forth", and it means he went forth. Although we do not use it in this way anymore, but we still have the similar gramma that puts the verb infront of object such as "Not only is he a good man, but also a rich man". 

Another response or question is that it does not really make sense that the wight or spirit kills people for no reason, but I'm looking forward seeing the hero coming up.