Foreign language dialogues

I love them! I adore them! Every time I see a dialogue in a language I’m somewhat familiar with I like to speak for different people in funny voices and intonations. Some of my characters speak fast, some slow. Some are polite, some are not so much. Some are women, children, some are old men. [...]

Semi-words

You know… There is one thing about Japanese language I have mixed feelings about. It’s the kanji. When in any other (almost any) language you can at least read what’s written because there are letters, in Japanese language you just see those hieroglyphs and… that’s it. Then everything depends on your knowledge, skill. Currently, I’m [...]

Synesthesia TED talk

Well, the talk is not just about synesthesia (starts on 17th minute), but it was very interesting anyway. Basically, it appears that we can mix any kind of senses together and it’s quite normal. Maybe, it is the mechanism of how we, humans, can come up with unique ideas all the time.

Deadly arousal

Have you ever thought about why people have wars and why we keep developing new and new ways to kill each other? Why we don’t kill each other with knives and sticks? I can tell you why. If you see any kind of development, it means that there are money for it. And if there [...]

Synesthesia

I’m no neurologist, so, obviously, I’m not qualified to make diagnoses. Nonetheless, back when I was a kid I started noticing that nobody else experienced a strange thing I felt. I could feel what other people feel when I looked at them. So, I could sense the mood, if a person feels pain, I could [...]

Soft. But unflexible.

There is one thing that frustrates me the most about the modern PCs. I have no idea why it is as it is, but it annoys me. The thing is the rigidity of modern operating systems. And I’m not talking about the good kind of rigidity as reliability and stability. I’m talking about rigidity as [...]

Chasing the ecstasy

I like sitcoms. They are positive and conveniently-packed (20-minute episodes). But I keep noticing the disturbing tendency. Sitcoms are getting more and more “exaggerated”, more and more “grotesque”. I had this weird feeling that the very thing that makes them funny (exaggerated characters and reactions), also makes them too simple, too superficial. And recently I [...]

Photo opportunity

Warning: It’s 6 AM and I woke up at 4:30. So, the following might be nonsense.   You know, I was always told that my photos are beautiful. I mean, the ones that I take. For some reason, people thought that I was good at taking beautiful pictures. Well, maybe they were right. I do [...]

Dear spammers,

So, I was lying in my bed,trying to fall asleep. I was thinking about the future of education, about my new project and, for some reason, about my habit to wake up in the middle of the night and check my email. And then it hit me… Why everybody hates spam (especially, when you wake [...]

Intimacy

I was reading a book by some American dude in which he talks to Dalai Lama about some psychological topics like happiness, intimacy etc… So, one of the ideas was that there is no single definition for intimacy. Is it mental (feeling of unity)? Is it physical (touch)? What makes a relationships intimate? I have [...]