2010年8月6日 星期五
金山夜戏
惟恐其非梦，又惟恐其是梦
一寒士乡试中式，方赴鹿鸣宴，恍然犹意非真，自啮其臂曰：“莫是梦否？”
一梦耳，惟恐其非梦，又惟恐其是梦，其为痴人则一也。
陶庵夢憶 明·張岱
“年至五十，国破家亡，避迹山居。所存者，破床碎几折鼎病琴，与残书数帙，缺砚一方而已。布衣蔬食，常至断炊 。
“陶庵国破家亡，无所归止，披发入山，骇骇为野人。故旧见之，如毒药猛兽，愕窒不敢与接。作自挽诗，每欲引决，因《石匮书》未成，尚视息人间。然瓶粟屡罄，不能举火 。”
因想余生平，繁华靡丽，过眼皆空，五十年来，总成一梦。
2010年7月22日 星期四
Hans Rosling on global population growth | Video on TED.com
The world's population will grow to 9 billion over the next 50 years -- and only by raising the living standards of the poorest can we check population growth.
2010年4月28日 星期三
decline of violence
Steven Pinker's books have been like bombs tossed into the eternal nature-versus-nurture debate. Pinker asserts that not only are human minds predisposed to certain kinds of learning, such as language, but that from birth our minds -- the patterns in which our brain cells fire -- predispose us each to think and behave differently.
His deep studies of language have led him to insights into the way that humans form thoughts and engage our world. He argues that humans have evolved to share a faculty for language, the same way a spider evolved to spin a web. We aren't born with “blank slates” to be shaped entirely by our parents and environment, he argues in books including The Language Instinct; How the Mind Works; and The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.
In 2003, Harvard recruited Pinker for its psychology department from MIT. Time magazine named Pinker one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004. His latest book is The Stuff of Thought, previewed at TEDGlobal 2005. He is working on a new book that studies violence.
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