Sex, drugs and stock trade

Few weeks ago I went to the movies and saw Wolf of the Wall Street, starred by Leonardo di Caprio (unfortunately with subtitles). The movie tells the unbelievable and previously untold story of the Jordan Belfort, who was the insolent stock broker who founded The Stratton Oakmont company and shocked the Wall street by earning enormous amounts of money. After seeing the movie I immediately rushed to book store and bought the original Wolf of the Wall Street book by Jordan Belfort. After seeing the movie I thought that his story was absolutely crazy and the movie just exaggerated his life in order to get more interesting plot. But after reading the book, I realised that the movie wasn't exaggerating at all.

 Jordan Belfort really lived the life of a rock star. His life was filled with drugs, women and most importantly, money. He could buy almost anything he wanted. He also founded the Stratton Oakmont, company that shortly became the most notorious company in the Wall street. Every young stock broker wanted to work there and the atmosphere of the company was absolutely unspeakable. There was only one, huge room filled with tables and phones and day after day young brokers shouted and sweated to there phones and make millions of dollars.

"Mad Max went on and on in typical Mad max fashion, but I tuned out. In fact, I found myself mesmerised by this wonderful ability he had to tie so many curses together with such little forethought and still make the sentence so very poetic. It was truly beautiful the way he cursed-like Shakespeare with an attitude! And at Stratton Oakmont, where cursing was considered a high art form, to say that someone knew how to tie their curses together was a compliment of the highest order."

The movie follows quite loyally the book, but there has been some changes in the plot order. The movie starts typically from the beginning of Belforts life and end in his arrest. But the book instead starts from the middle and consists some flashbacks to Belforts past as a young stockbroker. The book as it self is obviously pretty populistic and not "high literature" but it looks like it's writer: Rough and exciting. The language of the book is fairly easy to understand, in my opinion, but here is some financial vocabulary that was new to me. The language of the book is also very fun and compelling and after reading the first pages, you don't want to stop anymore.

 I have always been interested in biographies, especially by the notorious Rock groups like Guns'n Roses or Motley Crew. I think that is the reason why I got so hooked up to the Wolf of the Wall Street. The life of the Jordan belfry has been like some weird dream loaded with money and drugs. And the most exciting part of it is that it's a true.

Time used in reading: 20 hours
Time used in writing: 1 hour

Translation group, first homework

The goal of the translation group is to learn some basic methods of translation from english to Finnish and vice versa. Our first job was to translate the article from Helsingin sanomat.

Have you heard about Bina48 that tells jokes and categorizes its emotions in clumsy way? A short introduction seems to be appropriate. Bina48 is a robot but it is so advanced that it’s almost human. It’s face reminds real female face. Bina can even talk about the meaning of life, because it has been attempted to enter the consciousness of one person: memories, feelings, beliefs and enormous amount of information. Although Bina is still in the clid’s level, it still proves how unbelievable things man can do with technology. Anthony Giddens, one of the Europes most known british sociologist is enormously fascinated in the constantly accelerating interaction between man and technology. Giddens, 76 lectured last week in London at European Council on Foreign Relations-think tank. The topic was the future of Europe, but the thinker who is best known for his holistic understanding of the society, sketched the whole world in a new way because of the Bina Firstly Giddens believes that we have moved to the new geological era, anthropocene. According to the Nobel awarded aerialchemist Paul Cutzen, human edits nature nowadays so powerfully that human has started to act as a power of nature. Nature is no more nature. On the other hand, human uses the technology to the human body and mind more radically than ever before. For example we don’t know how internet affects to us. We humans are on the changing point were we won’t be humans again, says Giddens. There will be new order of world. “This is we don’t know –world. It is the society of great opportunities and risks. Giddens is not only a social theorist. He has also been working as counselor for Tony Blair, Britains former prime minister and in the 1990’s he developed so-called “third road” ideology for Labour party. Now Giddens wants to wake up European politicians who fight with euro crisis, decreasing of the jobs and reduction programs. Regardless he thinks that Europe is not doomed to decadence. Sociologist talks about new industrialism in Europe for example. And he don’t think it’s not possible. There is a new revolution in the industrial production, thanks to the 3D printers and digital production. Giddens thinks that digital production is enormous opportunity for Europe, although there is no guarantee about the new jobs. Proffesor complained that Europe is badly left behind in the second revolution where energy markets are captured by controversial gas. Social theorist is painting with so thick brush that it takes breathless. According to Giddens technology can crumble our modern society: Work and studying changes when they are no longer linked to only one specific place. Do we even need prisons when criminals could be controlled by other means? It-power Google can grow stronger than any nation. We don’t know yet. “There are things that we know and things that we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns –things that we don’t know so we don’t know said Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defence of the United states in 2002. In that time world was shoked by the war against the terrorism. Philosophising about the Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction went totally wrong in Rumsfeld. It has instead created totally unknown unknows that have changed the world faster than no one can predict. For example 12 years ago we haven’t heard about iPad´s or Facebook.

Time used in groups 3 horus Time used in translation 3 hours