• 转载自http://huangy1101.blog.sohu.com/

    班主任林菁辱骂逼死我女儿黄一馨

    馨儿

    早上6点的钟点响了,老爸爬起来给你做饭,可是我的馨儿却听不到老爸的呼唤。你可知道,老爸的车还停在楼下,等着送你上学,等着同你一起看新电视、新碟片,等着你享用老爸的饭菜,等着你暑假一起去看长城、看故宫、看升旗……

    你可知道妈妈躺在床上起不来,她还不明白,还等着你吃晚饭,等着你有声有色地诉说评论班上的事、学校的事,等着你拿着小本子来签名,等着你睡觉前的“晚安”呢……

    馨儿,你上初中时,我们曾有约定:“信任、向上、不偷看”。可你不在了,老爸老妈帮你收拾东西,看了你的QQ空间,看了你的日记,看了你的短信,看了你的文章,看了你的新书……

    经过艰难的了解,老爸老妈不再流泪了,心中只有李云龙攻打平安县城和清风寨为亲人报仇的决断。

    事情的经过是这样的:

    12日放学后,一馨找到同学Y质问,因为发现了Y在发给别人的短信中骂她骂得很难听。Y本是一馨的知心密友,而一馨对友情抱有美好的期望。吵完架回家后,一馨情绪低沉,无心做作业。妈妈发现一馨的异常,询问之后,一馨说出了原委,并说出了她的困惑:“好朋友怎么能这样做啊?”妈妈很重视,细心地给她解释朋友的多种类型,每个人都要经历对各种类型朋友的认识,成人世界如何对待各类型朋友。经过一番充分的交流,一馨释然了,高兴地表示“我要好好学习!”就去做作业了。一场对友情的信念危机过去了。

    13日,太阳照样升起,一切都是这样美好。但是,面带灿烂笑容上学的一馨根本就没有意识到,死神已经在向她逼进。

    13日上午,班主任林菁从同学Z那儿知道了头一天一馨和Y吵架的事,就找一馨和同学Y到办公室训话,训话明显是针对一馨一人的。

    上午训完后,林菁并没有就此罢休。下午最后一堂课,林菁当着全班同学的面,要求同学Y在班级里的电脑上打开QQ空间,因为电脑的原因没能打开,于是林菁带着同学Y转到办公室打开同学的 QQ空间。林菁紧接着满脸怒气来到教室,面对全班同学,劈头盖脑地开始责骂一馨,足足辱骂了30多分钟……黄一馨,你不要挑战我的极限,你不要考验我的耐心,你不要拿死来吓唬我!……恐吓是犯罪!不要自以为自己很聪明,拿生命做赌注……监狱是给什么人准备的?就是给你这样的人准备的……你这么肮脏,别污染我们全班同学……你真的很脏、很坏……你不适合就转学……

    这堂辱骂课结束后,一馨对同学W说,“可能,明天你们再也见不到我了。”

    一个多小时后,悲剧发生了。

    一馨出生于1996年5月20日,再过2天就是她13周岁的生日。两年前一馨以优等生源进入上海卢湾区李惠利中学,事发前在班级担任少先队中队委员,在刚刚结束的期中考试中名列班级第5名,全年级第7名。平时她活泼开朗,多才多艺,按班主任林菁的评价“工作能力有目共睹,出色地完成了任务,并且还能主动挑起重担,同学与老师对你工作的认可,应该可以让你更好的成长。期待在新的一个学期中,你能带给大家更多的欣喜。”同学、亲友、邻里都说她是一个乖巧懂事的好孩子。

    为什么这样优秀的孩子会选择跳楼自杀呢?班主任一天内一再痛骂、羞辱,公开用30多分钟的时间来辱骂。这样强烈的刺激,如何让一个13岁的孩子来承受?

    悲剧已经发生,但谁能保证这样的悲剧不会重演呢?家长还敢把孩子交给这样的班主任吗?

    馨儿,老爸老妈一定要为你讨回公道!

                                                                      老爸  2009-5-18     

     

      

    2009-05-16 | 优秀生为什么从学校回家就跳楼——一位父亲在女儿生日前悲绝的呼唤

      优秀生为什么从学校回家就跳楼

    ——一位父亲在女儿生日前悲绝的呼唤

     馨儿:

    再过4天就是你13岁生日,你却安静地躺在殡仪馆冰冷的柜子里,再也看不到老爸,老爸也看不到你了。儿啊,你有天大的委屈,也可以告诉老爸,不要从楼上跳下去,结束自己的生命。

    5月13日一早,我们象往常一样骑着电动车,沿着鲁班路、斜土路,一路上有说有笑,到了位于肇周路的李惠利中学。你下了车,关注地问:“老爸,你的牙齿不疼了吗?”我说:“好多了。”你便灿烂地一笑,说:“再见。”就背着书包,跑进了校门。

    我骑车到复兴路口腔医院去看医生,看好后,已经10点钟了,想起约好了安装新买的液晶彩色电视机,就回到家。这是你盼望了很久的电视机。安装好后,我心想我的馨儿今晚就可以一起看电视了。我又骑车到单位。下午4点多,我提前回到家。5点钟左右,馨儿回来了,我连忙说,电脑关不上了,你去看看有什么问题。你放下书包,看了一下电脑说:有病毒,打个补丁就行了。便拎起书包说:今天作业多,我去做作业了。我说:早点做好,早点吃饭,早点看电视。

    你象往常一样关上门,我走进厨房准备晚饭。烧好第二个菜,端到餐桌上,听到电话铃响,就拿起话筒,是一个女同学打来的,问:黄一馨在家吗?我说:在家。问她有什么事吗?你是谁?她没有回答就挂了。我心里一惊,忙叫:馨儿,你同学有电话怎么不接?没有回答。我看你的房间门开着,灯却关着。以为你在大卧室看电视,进去看也没有人。转身出来时,看到阳台上有一把椅子,心里再次一惊,奔到阳台伸头一看,你已经跳下去了。我疯了一样大叫,狂奔下楼,掏出手机打110。奔到楼下,看到我的馨儿已被保安托着放在楼下的小路上。我紧紧地抱住你大叫。馨儿啊,你挺过来啊,你挺过来。可是你再也不睬我了。我口对口徒劳地给你呼吸。这时110来了,一番抢救后,医生摇摇头。我看你满脸是血,脱下我的背心想给你擦一下。邻居递过来一个湿纱巾说:用这个擦擦吧。我小心地擦去你脸上的血迹,你象睡着了一样,乖乖的。

    这时,警察拉起隔离绳,天已经黑了。我给你盖上被单,握着你的手,不停地叫你,希望能象你喜欢看的电视剧《亮剑》中那样,赵刚拉着李云龙把他唤醒了,可是再也叫不醒你了。

    殡仪馆的车来了,我把你抱上车。车开走了,你就这样永远离开了我。

    儿啊!是什么事情让你这样的绝望?让你这样决绝而勇敢地从11楼跳了下来。一个鲜活的生命就这样消失了。你可听到爸妈的呼唤?为什么一个优等生,从学校放学回家,就跳楼了?                                                         

  • 刚开始看

    2009-05-08

    分类:

       

         下午坐在电脑前一口气看完了INTRODUCTION:philosophy and basic facts.这是searle的一次讲座,他的助手整理之后送交出版社出版的,以至于searle本人收到这本书时都不知道已经有一本自己写的书出版了。虽然如此,searle依旧对他助手的工作予以了很高的评价。
      
      searle是个典型的自然主义者,对于心智问题他坚持以神经生物学来解决问题。这非常适合科学背景的朋友,Searle首先提出了basic facts这个概念,来概括目前我们所知的世界构成的知识,从而把他所要讨论的哲学问题建立在这些basic facts上,可以说在书中basic facts是Searle建立论证的hard core,是不能怀疑的。
      
      之后Searle提出了八个问题,或者说把大的哲学问题分解为八个小问题分别讨论。而这本书就是围绕这八个问题展开的,分别是:意识(consciousness),意向(Intentionality),语言(language)理智(Rationality),自由意志(free will),社会(society),政治(politics),伦理(ethics)。并且,Searle还详细的说明了这八个概念之间的关系 。
      
      在这一部分里,searle很直接的说明了他和传统哲学之间的区别,上面这八个问题一直都是哲学关心的话题,而Searle在这里对这八个问题的讨论是建立在自然主义上的。“all of these are very much part of the history of traditional philosophy. What is so special about the present period? I am arguing that it is now possible to treat all of these issues “naturalistically”, that is, in a way that makes them consistent with, and indeed a natural outgrowth from, what I call the basic facts.”
      
      此外,他还简单的回顾了进来哲学发展的一些变化,Searle认为,第一,现在语言哲学和认识论已经不再是哲学的中心问题了,其二,怀疑论不再是哲学的中心了。(偶觉得第一和第二其实是一个问题,或者说是大问题和其中的小问题的关系)。第三,系统的大范围的哲学理论成为了可能。“Systematic large-scale philosophy is now possible ”。第四,在哲学和其他学科间已经不存在明显的差别,或者说在概念和经验间的差异已经越来越模糊了。
      
      书中分成了两个部分来讨论这些问题,第一部分主要讨论前5个问题,后一部分主要讨论后3个问题,searle希望通过自然主义进路的分析来来协调上述八个概念和那些basic facts之间长久存在的矛盾。“Tere is, however, an interesting tension. It is not
      at all easy to reconcile the basic facts with a certain conception we have of ourselves.”
      
      继续往下看。。。。。。

  •      
          细数起来,齐豫算得上偶最中意的声音之一。而这张名叫《有没有这种说法》的集子这些日子不知为何总在脑子里飘来荡去。这是齐豫在1988年底时出的一张中文专辑。已经记不得第一次听这张专辑时确切的年纪了,大约是初中到高中的日子吧。那时候繁荣的盗版业养刁了一大批人的耳朵。这张专辑初听起来然我有种遇到外星人的感觉,一点不夸张,不管是词曲的写作还是这个照片上看起来有些异域风情的女人的唱法都让我觉得非常奇怪,一切都和当时的流行歌曲大相径庭。然而更奇怪的是它非常好听,好听的很特别。就好像吃惯了本帮菜第一次品尝正宗剁椒鱼头时的惊喜。哈哈。
          下面是这张专辑的曲目和完整的歌词,每首都足以拿出来作为一张专辑的主打歌,这12首歌放在一张专辑里,一口气听完有种掏心掏肺的冲动,就算是过了好多年再拿出来回味,依旧在心里牵扯的紧。不论是寥寥几句勾勒出的一面湖水,细腻入微讲述那个叫老的人,每首歌都是一个未尽的故事,虽然内容不同,却都给想象留下了很大的拓展空间。很多人用空灵来形容齐豫的声音,其实空灵的本质是这些词曲所营造的无限可能。你仿佛站在浩瀚宇宙中的一点,周遭的一切都沉浸在星辰闪耀的墨色无垠,心灵和身体一分为二,遥遥相对着打量彼此......
     
          专辑里这些词曲作者里有诗人陈克华,李格弟,有电影音乐大师张弘毅,有后来为周华健写了《摆渡人的歌》,《心的方向》等一大堆好歌的詹德茂,有写《掌声响起》的陈桂芬,早在民歌时代就已成名的王新连。李宗盛,梁弘志,涂惠源,林隆璇,虹(齐秦)等更不用说,都是在台湾流行音乐上举足轻重的人物。齐豫自己作词的《十二个夜晚》和《有没有这种说法》在里面也毫不逊色。偶个人觉得张专辑里较弱的一首歌是梁弘志的《窗外有蓝天》,觉得和整张专辑的风格不搭调,和其他的歌比起来也略显平淡,可延伸的空间太小了点,以至于给我留下的印象很有限。反倒是之后在梁弘志去世后的纪念专辑里才注意到这首歌,当然原因也是因为齐豫的演绎,这才又拼凑成了对这张专辑完整的记忆。
     
          我好像忘了最初想说什么来着,哦,可能是这样吧,我想说聆听一张流行歌曲的专辑,不单纯是对每一首歌的体会和抽丝剥茧,也可以是一次沉思,是一种自我反省,一次自己和自己的对话。虽然听得是别人的故事,历练的却是自己的心灵。
    在音乐和文字的交织中,可以体验到生活之外的经验,当然思想和想象是必要的媒介,宇宙,时间,他心和遥远的不知名的方向。。。
     
     ========================
     
    1.九月的高跟鞋

    作词:陈克华 作曲:虹 编曲:涂惠源

    脱下寂寞的高跟鞋 赤足踏上地球花园的小台阶
    这里不是巴黎 东京 或纽约
    我和我的孤独 约在悄悄的 悄悄的午夜

    走过了一长串的从前 好像看了一场 一场的烟火表演
    绚丽迷乱 耀眼短暂 还来不及叹息的时候 便已走得遥远

    (口白:我只好)
    脱下疲倦的高跟鞋 赤足踩上地球花园的小台阶
    我的梦想不在巴黎 东京 或纽约
    我和我的孤独 约在微凉的 微凉的九月

    2.如果真的不要

    作词:李格弟 作曲:虹 编曲:涂惠源

    你究竟是想给我 一大片的天空
    或者你只是想 远远的离开我
    独立的生活 或许可以实践许多的梦
    而你肩上那一片土地 却是我永远无法到达的巅峰 喔~
    你究竟是想给我 一大片的天空
    或者你只是想 远远的离开我
    人们给逃避太多华丽的藉口(理由)
    如果你真的不要这段感情
    (也)只需头也不回的走开就够 喔~
    如果想要得到一些温柔都是奢求
    是不是所有的脸孔都该停止笑容
    如果想要得到一些安慰都是罪过
    是不是所有的眼泪也都该停止再流 喔~

     

    3.忘了数羊

    作词:罗圣尔 作曲:罗圣尔 编曲:涂惠源

    他发现 少了一只羊 怀疑牧场西边山坡的恶狼
    怀疑隔壁烤肉店的老王 呜~
    可能是那个喜欢它的男孩
    带它去溜跶 带它去溜跶
    可能是躲在什么地方 怕我卖掉它
    怕我卖掉它 他只怪好几天 忘了数羊
    他发现 少了一只羊 怀疑牧场西边山坡的恶狼
    怀疑隔壁烤肉店的老王 呜~
    可能是那个喜欢它的男孩 带它去溜跶

    带它去溜跶
    山上的青草多憔悴 小羊儿可怜可怜你的爹娘
    难道怕我卖你到别家 难道怕我卖你到别家
    只怪好几天 忘了数羊 只怪好几天
    忘了数羊 呜~
    忘了数羊好几天 忘了数羊
    啊 忘了数羊好几天 忘了数羊
     
     

    4.雪中莲

    作词:陈桂芬 作曲:虹 编曲:涂惠源

    雪中的莲 花中的仙 开在冷冷的雪线边缘
    纵然烈日炎 风霜险 积雪千年
    也要等待 也要等待 那春到人间
    雪中的莲 花中的仙 开在遥远的天山上面
    明知情丝牵 情愁添 情火难遣
    也要坚持 也要坚持 这一身冷艳
    莫可奈何 你是那雪中最寂寞的莲啊
    怀抱着烦恼千万瓣 苦心一片
    独自在冰封的世界里面 追寻那永恒的春天
    雪中的莲 花中的仙 开在遥远的天山上面
    雪中的莲 花中的仙 开在冷冷的雪线边缘
    明知情丝牵 情愁添 情火难遣
    纵然烈日炎 风霜险 积雪千年
    也要等待 也要等待 那春到人间
    春到人间 春到人间
     

    5.那个叫老的人

    作词:詹德茂 作曲:虹 编曲:涂惠源

    他把孤独裁缝起来 当一件衣服穿
    穿过他看来木讷的表情 穿过他踽踽来去的路
    每一天的早晨 他把时间固定下来 喔~
    他把寂寞挂在脸上 当一付眼镜戴
    挂着对于时间的抱怨 挂着对于往日的怀念
    每一天的早晨 他把时间固定下来 喔
    想像再走过从前 一遍又一遍
    踩着方寸的脚步 画太极的图
    关于年纪的事 滑落在十指之间
    关于岁月流转 在风中吐呐
    手在空中画过一圈 未来又走了一段时间
    (和音)晨中的太极 推拖的游戏
    然而 他是个叫老的人 终究 还是输给年纪
    每个人的故事 从自己的哭声中开始
    在别人的哭声中结束

     

    6.有没有这种说法

    作词:齐豫 作曲:虹 编曲:涂惠源

    有没有这种说法 常常飞行的人离天堂比较近
    有没有这种说法 多喝几杯的咖啡就能写出动人的文章
    昨天 我企图和上帝打交道
    请祂修改我的命运 上帝保持一贯的沉默就像祂从不承诺
    有没有这种说法 自命清高的人就不必接受挑战
    有没有这种说法 接近热烈讨论的群众就不必惧怕落后
    昨天 我企图和上帝打交道
    请祂赐给我勇气 上帝保持一贯的沉默就像祂从不承诺
    有没有这种说法 面对不公平的世界可以用不诚实的手段
    有没有这种说法 欺骗自己的人就能过得比较快乐
    昨天 我企图和上帝打交道
    请祂带我走进另一个世界 上帝保持一贯的沉默
    终于知道祂从不承诺

     

    7.冷冷的心

    作词:虹 作曲:林隆旋 编曲:涂惠源

    冷冷的夜里 冷冷的雨
    雨中寂寞的心 寂寞身影
    昨天的心情 昨夜的情
    今天的伤心 今天哭泣
    黑夜来临的失落 没有人能说
    一成不变的日子里 阳光不再走过
    在冰冷的夜 冰冷记忆 用冰冷想念着你

     

    8.细说从头

    作词:李宗盛 作曲:李宗盛 编曲:涂惠源

    忧愁有一点点 还不方便说
    泪有一点点 还不愿意流

    遗憾有一点点 还没来得及带走
    爱情有一点点 让我细说从头

    委屈有一点点 还没来的及带走
    爱情有一点点 已如江水东流

    而谁说我不爱你 这春天就是证据
    千头万绪我无从打理
    让我再说一次 我爱你
    再说一次 爱你

    细说从头 细说从头
    谁说我不爱你 这春天就是证据

    9.一面湖水
    作词:王新莲 作曲:虹 编曲:涂惠源 演唱:罗纮武

    有人说 高山上的湖水
    是躺在地球表面上的一颗眼泪
    那么说 我枕畔的眼泪
    就是挂在你心尖的一面湖水 一面湖水
     

    10.十二个夜晚

    作词:齐豫 作曲:虹 编曲:涂惠源

    昨夜你离去 我便把依赖塞进你的口袋里
    请你一并带走
    然后 我必须 持续枕边的眼泪
    十二个夜晚 喔~ 也许
    我说也许 能就此把你忘掉
    昨夜你又离去 我便把寂寞写进我的日记里
    让它永久停留
    然后 我必须 持续枕边的眼泪
    十二个夜晚 喔~ 也许
    我说也许 能就此完全自由
    十二个夜晚 十二个夜晚
    反覆思念 我还属于你
    十二个夜晚 十二个夜晚
    有点恍惚 寂寞就能化为自由
    我会想念 但不会想念的太久
    我会想念 但不会想念的太久 呜~
     

    11.窗外有蓝天

    作词:梁弘志 作曲:梁弘志 编曲:涂惠源

    如果我的祝福 能够让你不再感到孤独
    这属于春天的音符 我最美的祝福 是送给你成长的礼物

    如果我的付出 能够让你不再彷徨无助
    我愿将所有的希望 化成亮丽的阳光 照亮你心灵最深处

    爱就是 对明天的期待 对生命的关怀
    擦亮你心窗 抹去尘埃
    哦~ 你将会看见
    窗外依然有蓝天

    12.怨女

    作词:吕思志 作曲:张弘毅 编曲:涂惠源

    一生的错 开始在黄昏后 请你挪近烛火
    黑暗中是什么 牵引着我的手 朝向未知慢慢走
    一夜化作千夜 夜色与情怀如水 远处有暗雷低回
    生生离离 多少红尘旧事 只能在郁郁声中去回味
    别拆穿我哭过的痕迹 我的热情已成冰
    爱在燃烧后 不留下一点灰烬
    不要把我的痴狂抹去 我不在乎胭脂狼藉
    红色的泪 有我绝望的美丽
    红色的泪 有我绝望的美丽

     

    =======================================

  • PRESSING QUESTIONS FOR OUR CENTURY

    2009-05-04

    分类:

    PRESSING QUESTIONS FOR OUR CENTURY
      A Talk With AC Grayling
      
      我们这个世纪中一些紧迫的问题,AC Grayling教授的一个讲话,这里面就包含了哲学,科学,或者更直接的科学哲学在这个世纪中所要做的一些事情。
      
      
      来自edge http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/grayling09/grayling09_index.html
      
      PRESSING QUESTIONS FOR OUR CENTURY
      
      I'm asking myself a lot of questions at the moment and I'll pick out a few that are really pressing. One is the problem about scientific literacy in contemporary society. There are huge things going in the sciences, both in fundamental sciences, like particle physics, and in the biological sciences, especially in genetics and in medical research involving genetic techniques. In both respects, there have got to be big changes in the way we think about the world and how we think about ourselves. And in the case of biomedicine, there are going to be differences to longevity, health and maybe even the nature of future human beings.
      
      Everybody's got to be a participant in this conversation about what's happening in science — trying to understand it, be informed about it — and to be a participant in deciding how we go forward with these developments. In order for that to happen, more people have to be more informed about science. We have a problem at the moment, which is that too few people go on from school to study science at university.
      
      The point here is not about making more scientists necessarily, but making more people who are competent to observe what's happening in science, to be interested in reading about it, to keep abreast of developments, to be excited by what is happening in science. And as responsible and informed citizens of this world of ours, to be part of the discussion about what we should and shouldn't do with our science.
      
      The big question in this respect is, how are we going to reorganize science education in school and how are we going to encourage more people to take more interest in science? And, indeed, to encourage more scientists to talk to the public about what they're doing in science and what they are thinking about. So the big question for me here is, how are we going to make science, which belongs to everybody, which is important to everybody, available to everybody so that everybody can be a party, in one way or another — whether as a spectator or as a participant — in this enormous adventure.
      
      Because, apart from anything else, science is the greatest achievement of human history so far. I say that as a huge admirer of the Renaissance and Renaissance art, music and literature, but the world-transforming power of science and the tremendous insights that we've gained show that this is an enterprise, a wonderful collective enterprise, that is a great achievement of humanity. How are we going to make more people party to that? That's a pressing question for our century. Starting right from the very beginning of grade school, finding ways of making science more accessible, not frightening people away from mathematics and physics, not making them think that it's all too difficult, finding ways of drawing them in and getting them engaged — that's one.
      
      Another big question for me, and I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about it, is the question of human rights and civil liberties in our world. We think of the Western liberal democracies as representing and embodying an achievement, which took off in the Enlightenment but by a process that began even before then of respecting individual autonomy, creating institutions which embody due process of law and respect individual rights, including rights to privacy, and which lead to a big margin of individual decision over important matters in life, like our relationships and where we live and the kinds of things that we do, protecting us from the power of the state, protecting us from the power of majorities who disagree with our own choices.
      
      These are very significant and central things. It's a remarkable feature of the Western world that by the second half of the twentieth century we came pretty close to a dispensation where individuals could regard themselves as free citizens of the world with a marked degree of autonomy.
      
      Tragically, because of terrorism and crime, and also because of the development of technologies which have enabled us to communicate with one another much more rapidly, but which have exposed our communications to watching eyes, whether they're state authorities or bad people, we've got a serious situation even in our Western liberal democracies now involving the attrition, the erosion, the degrading of aspects of our civil liberties. It's tremendously important that before that goes too far, we become alert to it and do something about it. We should get angry about some of the things that have happened, but in particular we should get energetic about protecting our civil liberties and trying to organize institutions and practices that protect liberties, and certainly awareness on the part of people to make them more vigilant about it.
      
      We see on the horizon China, which is a tremendous country, with a huge population, now one of the great economies of the world. Without any doubt, it's going be a superpower in the next generation or two. And it's tremendously important, therefore, that that country should be one which, like the best among the liberal democracies in the West at any rate, has built into it respect for human rights and for civil liberties. It doesn't at the moment; it sometimes tries to pretend that it does, but it doesn't have a good record in this respect. If it were to become an even more powerful player on the world stage, it would matter whether or not it did respect these things. Now is the time, too, to be having a conversation about that, thinking a bit about the future and trying to make sure that these frameworks for protecting individuals and communities are properly in place.
      
      My second big question, therefore, concerns how we are going to defend civil liberties and human rights. How are we going to expand interest and commitment to this? By the way, one footnote to this is that the United Nations, which back in 1948 adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and then subsequently the great Covenants on Civil and Political Liberties and on Economic and Social Rights, has become a weak and compromised organization. If you look at the United Nations Council of Human Rights, which I have some involvement with, it's a body, which has on it a majority of states and countries whose human rights records are nothing to write home about. Another difficulty, too, is that our major international instruments are likewise compromised. Here is a great job of work to be done for anybody who's keen on the interest of individual human beings, and on the idea of good societies – on trying to make good societies so that there can be good individual lives in them. That's my second question.
      
      My third question is one which has much more to do with my own technical academic interests in philosophy, which have to do with the nature of consciousness and of experience and perception, thought and learning; indeed, in general with questions of the relationship between individual minds and their forms of cognition, and the domains over which thinking, experience, perception, memory and theorizing range.
      
      This is somewhat of a recondite area in philosophy, but of course it's an important one because it has practical applications, for example in thinking about how we would construct robots capable of doing some at least of the things human beings can do in dealing with their environments in a plastic and flexible way, so that they can learn from their environments and be adaptive to them.
      
      Trying to understand the nature of mind and mental processes, about consciousness, is a big frontier issue in philosophy of mind, in psychology, in the cognitive sciences and in the neurosciences. One thing we're witnessing today is that the walls between these different enterprises are coming down and they're influencing one another richly and fruitfully. My big question there is how do we further that process and what's going to come out of it? Because all sorts of surprising things are already becoming apparent as a result of the interaction between these disciplines.
      
      My final question is about the way we're going to be reading, communicating and reflecting in the future. At the moment, we're all very interested to know about the future in these respects. Not the future of the book specifically, although it has traditionally been one major focus for the reflective life – sustaining it, enabling communication between participants in it – because already we see the trend that there are different ways in which written content can be delivered to people who want it. Rather I mean the practice of reading, the practice of reflection, themselves; I mean the nature of what underlies our ability to be good conversationalists with one another, to be reflective and informed, to have a good knowledge of the classics, but also to be open to new ideas and new work across all the disciplines — history, the sciences, philosophy, and the literary arts. How are people going to relate to these things in the future, given that in the past this centrally involved reading and reflecting?
      
      This is an interesting question because in the past our culture has been one that depends tremendously on the written word, on literature in all its forms. If the way that the written word gets to people changes in ways that make people use it less, and this is a phenomenon becoming more widespread now — formulating ideas and communicating them in very compressed forms, as in text messages for example — that kind of phenomenon might make a difference to our cultural sensibility.
      
      So my next question is, how do we keep the best of the past while remaining flexible and receptive to this new world that our technologies are opening to us? Keeping alive the questioning, skeptical, fact-hungry, curious attitude towards the world that the best people in the past have exemplified. I think the example of the late nineteenth century working class man who taught himself to read the classics, who was inspired by them, and who went on to make significant contributions — this a story that repeated itself over and over again in the United States and in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, and one would like to think that that kind of excitement, that kind of self-discovery and self-making, will continue even in a society where the way it used to be done, by somebody taking a book off the shelf, is no longer the norm.
      
      You sometimes see the comment made, and it's a good one, that the experience of encountering texts, information, opinion and data is very different in current technologised forms as against the way it is when you read a book, or you go and browse in a book shop. There's a good point here — it's true. You walk into a book shop to buy a book, there are a whole lot of other books that, you stumble across, and you may even buy one of them. When you pick up a book, you browse it, you go backwards and forwards, unexpected things happen. Serendipity plays a big part in the education of an individual who loves to read.
      
      Now when you go to a technological device, you've got to be targeted. You've got to go to the thing you're looking for, and it's not all that likely that you're going to stumble across things that just come out of left field and interest you in the way that happens when you go into a bookstore. For example, you go online and click on a topic, and what the search engine provides you with is alternative stuff about that topic. But not about topics that you didn't even expect to find that time. Skeptics about the new technology rightly alert us to the fact that this changing relationship between the mind — one's own mind — and the texts that one comes across will have this new feature, and there is something to be regretted there.
      
      ~
      
      This year, 2009, is the 50th anniversary of the celebrated lecture given by C.P. Snow, a scientist and a novelist, and a civil servant — he was a government official in Britain back in the forties and fifties. On the ninth of May, 1959, he gave a lecture in Cambridge, the Rede Lecture, called "The Two Cultures," in which he said that humanistic culture, literary culture, on the one hand, and scientific culture on the other hand, had diverged very far, and that there was a mutual lack of comprehension across the resulting divide, mainly, of course, from the direction of the humanities.
      
      An additional problem was that so many people in positions of authority in society — members of parliament, ministers in the government — had been brought up in the humanities and didn't really have much of a scientific background at all, so they didn't really understand what was happening in the sciences. There's an old saying in the culture that C.P. Snow came out of, "let's have the experts on tap, not on top". They didn't want to have the scientists in government or in the civil service system with them unless, like him, they were people who were also recognizably of their own cultural kind so that therefore the MP's and others could feel comfortable with them. Snow accordingly decried this diverging gap between the two cultures.
      
      In the 50 years since Snow gave that lecture, that gap has widened far, far, far more. Yet it's still the case that people who make decisions about funding policies — the people in Congress, the people who get into presidential office — tend not to be scientists, they tend to be people who have come out of the humanities or the law. The problem identified by Snow has worsened. What are we to do about that?
      
      Well, I repeat a point that I make often, which is that the only way to bridge this divide is to increase literacy on both sides. The real urgency is increasing literacy about science on the humanities side, for those people, but it's a two-way street. Because scientists also need to realize that their responsibility to society at large places upon them a duty to talk about what they're doing, to explain what they're doing, to inform people about it. There should be interaction. This is the only way that the divide is going to be at least bridged, and of course in the ideal ultimately it would be closed.
      
      ~
      
      Almost every generation thinks that it occupies the time when things are not quite as good as they were in the past. It's a very common for people to think that the world is a much less safe place than it was when they were children, but that's because of course a child's experience usually is that the world is indeed a safe one, being protected and organised by parents.
      
      From the point of view of culture, and in particular from the point of view of British culture, a lot of visitors to the United Kingdom say how surprised they are by the unpleasant, rather raw nature, rather degraded and superficial nature of popular culture in the United Kingdom. The tabloid newspapers, the popular magazines, which are all about “celebrities”, which are all about a certain kind of voyeurism — they hunt in packs, the tabloid press, chasing after people, first to extol them and then to tear them down when they're up. And that there's a presumption that if a nail sticks up, it's got to be hammered down, so anybody who's a bit special in society or sticks out in a certain way is likely to get a hammering by the tabloid press.
      
      There is something rather sullied and sterile about popular culture in the United Kingdom. At the same time, it's always been the case that high culture flourishes in the United Kingdom — publishing, opera, ballet, music, the art scene — particularly in London, and London unfortunately, rather like Paris in France, does absorb a lot of the cultural oxygen in the country. Although other major centers, such as Birmingham, Manchester and Edinburgh, do make a contribution here, which is an important one. But high culture continues to flourish. Even despite the repeated efforts by people who are not very sympathetic towards high culture who say, "Why should society be funding high culture for high-brows? Why should the government be giving a subsidy to two opera houses in London?"
      
      But despite that, all you have to do is go to an exhibition, let's say at the National Gallery in London, and you can hardly get elbow room to see what's hanging on the walls because even though high culture is an avocation for a minority of society, that minority in absolute terms is growing all of the time. There remains a very energetic, very vigorous cultural life, mainly in the capital but all around the country, which is a resource for people who care about those things and who may be dismayed by the way that the popular culture has become so lowest-common-denominator. As regards this latter, I don't think that the United Kingdom is alone in being this way, but it is pretty marked and it is pretty distressing for people who come from time to time to visit.
      
      ~
      
      One thing we've witnessed in our times, of course, is the bad-tempered quarrel between the religions on one hand, and on the other hand those people who are not interested in or who are indeed opposed to religion. Some people say that one aspect of this is that religion is experiencing a resurgence, that more people are once again becoming interested in it. I just don't think that is the case.
      
      What is happening is that the amplifiers have been turned up a lot by people on the religious side of this discussion because they feel under threat. This has happened in history before; there are precedents for this. One goes back to the sixteenth, seventeenth century when the Reformation occurred and the consequence of that was the Counter-Reformation, the effort made by the Church of Rome to recover its hegemony over Europe. That was a bloody and painful hundred years, and the tumult made it seem as though the only thing that mattered at that time was religion. Now when we look back across the landscape of history, we see that a lot more important things were happening at that time than that religious quarrel — the rise of science, the great literary efflorescence in England and in the rest of Europe. What we learn from that is that when religious people feel under threat and under pressure, they turn up the volume and they fight back; it's the cornered-rat syndrome.
      
      What we've seen in the last few decades is this. We've seen globalization impacting areas of the world and putting traditional views under pressure, not least in predominantly Muslim areas of the world, where traditional conservative values are threatened by the much more open kind of society in the liberal West, which exports attitudes and practices disagreeable to traditional societies.
      
      You can imagine, for example, a conservative, traditional Muslim father of teenage daughters encountering an American movie with girls in bikinis, and becoming very worried about what effect that might have on his daughters; and you can sympathize with the fact that that is a problem and an anxiety for him. You can also see how, therefore, young men, especially in countries where there might not be enough work and few other outlets – segregated from girls, notably – are angered by this, angered by the difference between their own culture and others, and feeling under threat. And the result has been a ratcheting-up of the rhetoric, of the heat of the rhetoric. At the very margin, of course, at the extreme, there has been violence. But generally speaking, this is not a violent phenomenon; this is a phenomenon of quarrel, of tension.
      
      But Islam is a Western religion, too. It's in Europe, it's in North America. When Muslims in England became activist on behalf of their own community, making demands of the host community to be treated equally with other religious communities, what happened was that Hindus and other Christian groupings all wanted to do the same. They all came jostling together into the public square demanding tax funding for faith-based schools, representation in Parliament, dispensation from anti-discrimination laws. And so on and so on.
      
      This angered secularists who didn't want to see a recurrence of inflated religious influence in society. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, people didn't talk much about their religious faith if they had it , and if you were a secularist and you met somebody with a religious faith, as a matter of taste you likewise didn't talk about it. But after 9/11 especially, there was a watershed. A polarization occurred. People on the secular side of the discussion were just not prepared to pussyfoot around and to "respect" people who claimed a faith, and to give them an extra bit in the sunlight because of it, without some challenge, without a discussion about why they were entitled on the basis of that claim.
      
      Religious people have for a very long time said, "Respect me because I believe something." Now secularists are saying, "Why should I, especially if it's a belief in something that I don't share or that I think is challengeable?" That's my diagnosis anyway of how this quarrel has come up and also my diagnosis, too, of this being a phenomenon of amplification of the quarrel, not of resurgent numbers. Because we know that everywhere in the West, even in the United States of America, the number of people who lay claim to being religiously observant is decreasing.
      
      What are we going to do about this problem now? Well, our main challenge at the moment is how we manage this situation, how we live together and cope with the difficulty of having this bad-tempered quarrel going on. We have to try as hard as we can, people on the secular side of the argument, in a calm consistent and well-informed way, to keep this discussion going and to talk about how we're going to encourage younger people, for example, to think critically, to think for themselves, not to accept things on authority, not to take the easy option which is the quick simple story that a religion can tell you, but to do the work that's required of understanding things scientifically and with deeper insights.
      
      In the course of this quarrel between religion and people who have a non-religious outlook, one factor is that there are certain religious lobbies that are well organized and well funded. In the United States, for example, the religious Right has television stations, radio programs and publications, and it has lobbyists in Washington, and it's been able to state its point of view very cogently and powerfully for a long time. Whereas people, and there are many of them — 30 million or so in the last Pew poll — who self-describe themselves as agnostic or atheists or who have no religious commitment, are equal to just one person because they're independent and they think for themselves and they haven't got together to fund television and radio stations.
      
      Now in amongst all this, there is the following phenomenon. You get organisations like the Discovery Institute in Seattle, which is well funded and pushes the Creationist/Intelligent Design line. And you get institutions like the Templeton Foundation, which is wealthy and offers a very big money prize — more valuable in money terms than the Nobel Prize — and offers it to anybody who will, in effect, make it seem that religion and science are perfectly respectable bedfellows and even, indeed, that science supports some religious claims.
      
      If you think about this, people who do work in science in universities and elsewhere are not paid like bankers on Wall Street. You can imagine that just to say something, even if you don't really have a religious belief, to be friendly towards that point of view, you may end up with a million dollars. That's like bribery. That's a corrupting influence in this debate and a very bad one.
      
      Just recently, somebody who is both a physicist and a religious person, John Polkinghorne, wrote a book trying to show that religion has answers to scientific questions. He launched this book on the premises of the Royal Society in London — not sponsored by the Royal Society, but because he was a fellow of the Royal Society before he became a priest, he was able to ask if he could do this on Royal Society premises. It seemed to me that that was a very bad thing for the Royal Society to have done. It shouldn't have given any kind of imprimatur to this.
      
      The Royal Society is the one major institution for science in the United Kingdom, yet there are hundreds of church halls and other places where a book of that kind could have been launched. The Royal Society accepted money in the recent past from the Templeton Foundation for research projects. They've ceased to do so now. I used to write a column for the New Scientist magazine, which ran some Templeton ads until we complained about it. They have I think stopped doing that now.
      
      This is a mere corner of the larger debate at the moment, but an important corner because here is an institution, Templeton, which is using large sums of money to try to insinuate ways of thinking and talking and certain tendentious ideas into an enterprise — the enterprise of science — where they don't belong. There are other formats for religious opinions. One should not, in an open and liberal society, seek to silence them. They've got a right to say what they want to say, but without muddying the waters.
      
      ~
      
      I got interested in science in a way that might be regarded as a bit unusual. There are some philosophers who come out of science — did physics, biology or maths degrees — who are very knowledgeable and who work in the history and philosophy of science, bringing insights, for example, from the neurosciences into the work that they do in the philosophy of mind and cognitive studies. But for my own part, the story is this. I was educated in the British tradition which very early made people choose between the humanities and classical languages, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the science subjects.
      
      There had always been an implicit snobbery involved here that the clever kids would go on to the classical side of school and the ones with dirt under their fingernails and who didn't mind smells and bangs would go on to the science side of school. You were channeled, really without much discussion about what you wanted to do, into one or the other of these lines. I went on to the classical side of school and straight on into the humanities. But I quickly realized, just because of being something of a reader and having a lively curiosity, that this meant that I was missing something tremendously important. So I started to read in the sciences.
      
      Now the fact is that out there, and for a number of decades, there have been wonderful resources for people who don't have a professional scientific background or training in science, but which nevertheless give them some insights into what's going on in the sciences. The more you read, the more you interested become, the more you want to try and equip yourself with a bit of technical competency so that you can understand yet more; so you read more. And in very many ways, being an autodidact in this respect is a boon because you don't go through the process of early on being told what to think about things. You're doing it on your own.
      
      So I became passionate about it, recognized the tremendous importance of being as literate as one could possibly be as a spectator of science, and the importance of keeping up that interest. And more especially to get involved, to get involved in the discussion with scientists about what they are doing, what they are thinking, why they are doing it, where their work is going. Being involved in that kind of way, too, is a powerful continuing incentive to keep learning.
      
      This plugs into another thought I have, which is that the education that we get in grade school and college is really just the first step out of many thousands of steps that we ought to take in the lifelong process of teaching ourselves, of being educated by what other people are doing, what's happening in the world; being educated by staying intellectually alive, staying alert to everything that's going on out there. This is the imperative; this is what we should all be deeply engaged in, always.

  • 爱你已久

    2009-04-20

    分类:

  • 麻婆豆腐

    2009-04-20

    分类:美食

    今天说说的是大灰狼拿手的麻婆豆腐,正宗川味,实在是太好吃了。以至于现在每次都要买两盒豆腐,才能满足一顿饭的需要。要不就该抢着吃了。

    材料:盒装的豆腐(嫩豆腐),肉末,豆瓣酱(辣味的,超市里有卖,我买的是袋装的),花椒,老干妈(豆豉的那种)。姜末,胡椒粉,水淀粉。

    好了,开始做了。

    锅烧热,倒入适量油,把姜末和花椒放入煸炒出香味,倒入肉末翻炒一会,然后放入适量的豆瓣酱。

    接着放入老干妈

    加入少量水(水不能太多,会影响口味),倒入豆腐。

    加入少许胡椒粉,大火煮几分钟,然后用一些水淀粉勾芡,出锅就好了。哈哈。

    大功告成了~~~

  • 春游

    2009-04-06

    分类:美食