"What is Time?"

Comedy to me is light-hearted, good spirited humor that has the ability to make someone smile, or make them double over laughing. What can be offensive to one person, does not account for humor to me. I don’t find pleasure in jokes that single out and offend other people; I much prefer jokes that anyone can laugh at without feeling picked on. For this reason, I don’t find stand-up comedy very appealing. It tends to focus solely on singling people out and making jokes that only the majority of the audience will find humorous. At stand up comedies, there are generally many unhappy attendants by the time the show is over, and to me, that defeats the purpose of comedy. Comedy is meant to bring pleasure to people and allow for them to be distracted from the seriousness of life. With this view in mind, i appreciate Hayden’s attempt to convey humor through music, because it is a harmless and entertaining way to make someone smile.

I would like to study the perception of time in Vietnam.  Vietnam is a country that is proud of its tradition and still lives with it’s traditional values.  At the same time, Vietnam is also a developing nation, though it is not yet as modernized as many western countries.   As a result, I think it would be interesting to study how the country’s traditional values and developing modern cities influence its perception of time and compare that to the perception of time in the US.

a little on the history of time there as well as the strict government isolation effecting time

I will study the time in Japan because I love Japan crazily and Japanese culture is also a kind of eastern culture which is similar with Chinese culture, I want to figure out the differences between two culture.

The Incas lacked a distinct measurement for time.  They based their lives on when there was light, growing seasons, and certain religious celebrations.  They developed a minimalist calendar which helped predict growing seasons and tally days.  They were very reverent to their ancestors, and contemplated the future, so they had conceptions of past, present, and future.  They also crudely studied the lunar bodies.  I will compare their conceptions of space and time against other ancient Latin American civilizations such as the Aztecs and Mayans.   This intrigues me because so much of my life is dictated by the clock, which they lacked, and the well-defined calendar which they had not fully developed.

I would like to do my research about the perception of time in China. I think it will be very interesting to compare and contrast the differences and similarities between “ancient” chinese philosophers’ ideas about time and present day thoughts.

I came across an article from April 29th, 1986 that interested me in my searching for a research topic. The article is called “A Bridge Across Time: The Benin Factor in Nigerian History” by Prof. P.A Igbafe. In a brief overview, the article discusses the idea of connecting policies, government, and other things together or “building a bridge” across time and space.

ancient mayan civilizations

I think time in Rome before clocks will be interesting.

In high school, I took a theology class on world religions. We learned about Buddhism and touched briefly on the Buddhist approach to time. Time in the Eastern tradition is circular, and the Buddhist principle of reincarnation follows that line of thinking. For this research paper, I am going to look at Buddhism in Tibet and their ideas about time.