(목요모임) [5 Nov, 2015]Thursday meeting topic

[susanna]

이번 주 모임은, 아트에스프레소!! (롯데시네마3층)

App will let you 'smell' how your friends are doing

 

By Kim Young-jin

People love to see what their friends are up on social media. The question now is whether you want to smell what they've been doing as well.

That's what the people behind a new contraption called the "Ophone" ­ which will allows people to send smells across the internet -- are banking on.

Imagine walking through a forest and wanting to share the verdant fragrances with a friend. Or eating a fantastic meal and wanting to make a loved one envious.

The technology is not yet available to the public, but when it is, it will require several elements. One will need to have an app to send the "oNotes" as well as receptor that will emit the smells.

The app will come with 32 smells, which can be combined to create hundreds of thousands of different scents. One wonders which scents will be needed to create the fragrance of "kimchi jjigae" or the smell of the Seoul on a hot day.

On Tuesday, Harvard professor David Edwards, the inventor of the app, will send an "oNote" from the American Museum of Natural History in New York to a fragrance chemist in Paris.

Eventually, Edwards believes that people could be sharing scents all the time via social media.

"Scent is the world's natural tweet, because it takes just a few seconds to get a scent," he was quoted as saying. "The notion of people saying, ‘I miss you in New York,' by sending a scent is really interesting and powerful. Or imagine taking a scent selfie and posting it on Facebook."

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/world/2014/06/182_159180.html

1. Do you think it is possible to make app sending scent through the smart phone?

2. If it is possible, what smells do you want to send to your friends?

3. What other creative app would come out in the future? Be creative!

4. Do you want to know what your friends are doing? when?

5. What other technology do you expect to be developed?

History of Halloween

Halloween is the season for little ghosts and goblins to take to the streets, asking for candy and scaring one another silly. Spooky stories are told around fires, scary movies appear in theaters and pumpkins are expertly (and not-so-expertly) carved into jack-o'-lanterns.

Amid all the commercialism, haunted houses and bogus warnings about razors in apples, the origins of Halloween are often overlooked. Yet Halloween is much more than just costumes and candy; in fact, the holiday has a rich and interesting history.

Samhain

Halloween, also known as All Hallows' Eve, can be traced back about 2,000 years to a pre-Christian Celtic festival held around Nov. 1 called Samhain (pronounced "sah-win"), which means "summer's end" in Gaelic.

Because ancient records are sparse and fragmentary, the exact nature of Samhain is not fully understood, but it was an annual communal meeting at the end of the harvest year, a time to gather resources for the winter months and bring animals back from the pastures. Samhain is also thought to have been a time of communing with the dead, according to folklorist John Santino.

"There was a belief that it was a day when spirits of the dead would cross over into the other world," Santino told Live Science. Such moments of transition in the year have always been thought to be special and supernatural, he added.

Halloween provides a safe way to play with the concept of death, Santino said. People dress up as the living dead, and fake gravestones adorn front lawns — activities that wouldn't be tolerated at other times of the year, he said.

But according to Nicholas Rogers, a history professor at York University in Toronto and author of "Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night" (Oxford University Press, 2003), "there is no hard evidence that Samhain was specifically devoted to the dead or to ancestor worship.

"According to the ancient sagas, Samhain was the time when tribal peoples paid tribute to their conquerors and when the sidh [ancient mounds] might reveal the magnificent palaces of the gods of the underworld," Rogers wrote. Samhain was less about death or evil than about the changing of seasons and preparing for the dormancy (and rebirth) of nature as summer turned to winter, he said.

Though a direct connection between Halloween and Samhain has never been proven, many scholars believe that because All Saints' Day (or All Hallows' Mass, celebrated Nov. 1) and Samhain, are so close together on the calendar, they influenced each other and later combined into the celebration now called Halloween.

Costumes and trick-or-treating

The tradition of dressing in costumes and trick-or-treating may go back to the practice of "mumming" and "guising," in which people would disguise themselves and go door-to-door, asking for food, Santino said. Early costumes were usually disguises, often woven out of straw, he said, and sometimes people wore costumes to perform in plays or skits.

The practice may also be related to the medieval custom of "souling" in Britain and Ireland, when poor people would knock on doors on Hallowmas (Nov. 1), asking for food in exchange for prayers for the dead.

Trick-or-treating didn't start in the United States until World War II, but American kids were known to go out on Thanksgiving and ask for food — a practice known as Thanksgiving begging, Santino said.

"Mass solicitation rituals are pretty common, and are usually associated with winter holidays," Santino said. While one tradition didn't necessarily cause the others, they were "similar and parallel," he said.

Tricks and games

These days, the "trick" part of the phrase "trick or treat" is mostly an empty threat, but pranks have long been a part of the holiday.

By the late 1800s, the tradition of playing tricks on Halloween was well established. In the United States and Canada, the pranks included tipping over outhouses, opening farmers' gates and egging houses. But by the 1920s and '30s, the celebrations more closely resembled an unruly block party, and the acts of vandalism got more serious.

Some people believe that because pranking was starting to get dangerous and out of hand, parents and town leaders began to encourage dressing up and trick-or-treating as a safe alternative to doing pranks, Santino said.

However, Halloween was as much a time for festivities and games as it was for playing tricks or asking for treats. Apples are associated with Halloween, both as a treat and in the game of bobbing for apples, a game that since the colonial era in America was used for fortune-telling. Legend has it that the first person to pluck an apple from the water-filled bucket without using his or her hands would be the first to marry, according to the book "Halloween and Commemorations of the Dead" (Chelsea House, 2009) by Roseanne Montillo.

Apples were also part of another form of marriage prophecy. According to legend, on Halloween (sometimes at the stroke of midnight), young women would peel an apple into one continuous strip and throw it over her shoulder. The apple skin would supposedly land in the shape of the first letter of her future husband's name.

Another Halloween ritual involved looking in a mirror at midnight by candlelight, for a future husband's face was said to appear. (A scary variation of this later became the "Bloody Mary" ritual familiar to many schoolgirls.) Like many such childhood games, it was likely done in fun, though at least some people took it seriously.

1. Can you explain the history of halloween?

2. How is halloween celebrated in your country?

3. Do you believe in ghosts?

4. What makes you afraid of ghosts?

5. What are some of the symbols of halloween?

6. What kind of costume are you going to wear to the halloween party?

7. If you could use a magical spell, like a love spell, on somebody, would you?

8. Did you have halloween party? How did you celebrate the day?

health benefits of coffee

1. It may help you live longer.

True, coffee drinkers are more likely than nondrinkers to smoke, eat red meat, skimp on exercise, and have other life-shortening habits, according to a 2012 study in the New England Journal of Medicine. But when researchers took those factors into account, ①they found that people ages 50 to 71 who drank at least one cup of coffee per day lowered their risk of dying from diabetes, heart disease, or other health problems when followed for more than a decade. That may be due to beneficial compounds such as antioxidants—which might ward off disease—and not caffeine. Decaf drinkers had the same results.

2. It may perk you up.

Coffee is not just a pick-me-up; it also has been linked to a lower risk of depression. ②In a study led by the Harvard School of Public Health that tracked 50,000 women for 10 years, those who drank four or more cups of caffeinated coffee per day were 20 percent less likely to develop depression than nondrinkers.

Another study found that adults who drank two to four cups of caffeinated cof­fee were about half as likely to attempt suicide as decaf drinkers or abstainers. The researchers speculated that long-term coffee drinking may boost the production of “feel good” hormones such as dopamine.

3. It contains many good-for-you chemicals.

For most Americans who drink coffee, it provides more antioxidants than any other food, according to Joe Vinson, Ph.D., a chemistry professor at the University of Scranton. But it’s also a top source of acrylamide, a chemical whose link to can­cer is being investigated.

4. It may cut your risk for type 2 diabetes.

A recent Harvard-led study of more than 120,000 men and women found that those who increased the amount of caffeinated coffee they drank per day by more than one 8-ounce cup, on average, were 11 percent less likely to develop type 2 diabetes than those whose coffee habits stayed the same. And those who decreased their daily intake by at least a cup per day, on average, were 17 percent more likely to develop the disease.

But nix the doughnut with your morning cup; excess sugar might cancel out any benefit you might get from a balanced blood sugar level. And watch how much sugar and cream you add to your java—overdo it and you have a calorie- and fat-packed beverage.

5. Most people don't have to worry about the caffeine.

Data suggest that most healthy adults can safely consume, daily, up to 400 milligrams of caffeine—the amount in around two to four cups of brewed coffee. (Exact amounts vary a lot, though.) Pregnant women should keep it to less than 200 milligrams; kids, no more than 45 to 85 milligrams. More than that can cause side effects including insomnia, irritability, and restlessness. Caffeine stimulates the central nervous system, heart, and muscles.

So if you have an anxiety disorder, irritable bowel syndrome, or heart disease, or if you take certain medications, watch your consumption or opt for decaf. And if you have acid reflux, you might want to skip coffee altogether because the acidity could exacerbate it.

1. Are you a ‘coffeeholic’?

2. Do you care if you have instant or blend coffee?

3. Do you need coffee to wake you up in the morning?

4. Is coffee bad for you?

5. Does coffee affect your appetite?

6. What do you think of Starbucks?

7. What do you think of the new trend of flavored coffee?

8. Do you like the smell of coffee?

9. What would you like to know about coffee?

10. When do you drink coffee?

11. Why drinking coffee is getting popular compare to before?

[Scarlet]

진실 지난주 토요일 할로윈 주제 했는데. ㅋ
뭐 참석자 구성이 틀리니까 괜찮을 것 같기도 하지만.. 혹시나 해서 알려줘.

[susanna]

앗ㅋㅋ제가 토욜주제를 확인 안해봤네요ㅜ.ㅜ 다른 걸 찾아볼게요~

[Scarlet]

[5 Nov, 2015]Thursday meeting topic <-------- 제목변경해주세요