【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障2系列】【2-13】文史哲

泾渭不凡

速度
A Lightning Rod Masquerading as a Sculpture[attachimg=190,316]101824[/attachimg]

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LONDON — Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, has said that the ArcelorMittal Orbit, a spiraling goliath of red tangled steel that stands 35 stories above the city’s Olympic Park, would have “dwarfed” the aspirations of Gustave Eiffel and “boggled the minds” of the ancient Romans.
Many Londoners don’t see it quite that way.
They’ve called the Orbit, designed by the Indian-born sculptor Anish Kapoor and the Sri Lankan architect Cecil Balmond, the “Eye-full Tower” and “Helter-Skelter,” and have compared it to a “contorted mass of entrails.” Envisioned as a symbol of London looming over the site of this summer’s Olympic Games, the Orbit, which visitors will enter, ascend and explore, is designed as an attraction to rival the London Eye and Big Ben for decades to come. And, at least for now, the sculpture is also serving as a prime target for British Olympic crankiness.
“The most lasting legacy of the multimillion-pound circus about to roll into town will be a big red clot on the landscape,” the columnist Catherine Cain wrote of the Orbit in The Watford Observer, the newspaper of a town near London. One of the most visible additions to the London skyline in decades and its tallest sculptural tower (about 70 feet higher than the Statue of Liberty), the Orbit has drawn criticism not just for its avant-garde design, but as a symbol — in spite of its mostly private financing — of the billions in government money being spent on the Olympics at a time when Britons are struggling under austerity measures put in place by the Conservative government of Prime Minister David Cameron.
The project has also brought out Londoners’ complicated feelings about public art, several people involved in the project said.
“We have a funny view about public art in Britain — it’s seen as slightly odd and elitist,” said John Simpson, an architect at Ushida Findlay, a London firm that helped transform the sculpture into a structurally sound, functional building. (The Orbit has had a more favorable reception among art and architecture critics.)
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That the tower, which will open to the public with the start of the games on July 27, will have an admission price of £15 ($23), on top of the £10 ($15) entrance fee to the park, only adds to a widespread perception of excess and elitism.
In an interview Mr. Kapoor called the Orbit’s entry fee “a lot of money for a lot of people” and said after the Olympics he’d like a price that matched his vision of a “democratic monument open to all.”
Mr. Cameron has promoted the city’s post-Olympic plans to develop the derelict district of Stratford in East London into a mixed-use development, with the Orbit as a focal point. “I think it’s time to tear up any notion of the Olympics’ leaving behind white elephants,” Mr. Cameron said in a news conference.
But 51 percent of British residents surveyed in March said they disagreed with Mr. Cameron’s statements that the Olympic Games would be well worth the £9.3 billion ($14.5 billion) cost to taxpayers, according to ComRes, a polling company. Government officials have since said that that figure has risen by an estimated 20 percent to £11 billion ($17.2 billion), driven largely by the cost of security.
The Orbit project got its start in 2009 after Mr. Johnson ran into Lakshmi N. Mittal, the chief executive of the huge steel maker ArcelorMittal and one of the world’s richest men, at the coat check room at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The mayor pitched Mr. Mittal the idea of building something to add artistic panache to the Olympic Park. Constrained by Britain’s deep recession, the city, Mr. Johnson told Mr. Mittal, needed a private donation to build its largest public art project in decades.
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Mr. Mittal contributed £19.6 million pounds (or $31.4 million), almost the entire budget of the project, to have the sculpture named after his company. Nearly 60 percent of the more than 2,000 tons of steel used to make the Orbit came from recycled scrap. The materials were procured from every continent in which ArcelorMittal operates and were assembled in a factory near Manchester.
“The U.K. didn’t have the money that the Chinese had for Beijing,” said Ian Louden, head of brand worldwide for ArcelorMittal. He added that the company saw the structure as a chance to spread brand awareness.
In 2010 Mr. Kapoor and Mr. Balmond, who then worked for the engineering and design firm Arup (best known for its work on the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Sydney Opera House and the “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium in Beijing), won an open competition to design something that would add pizazz to the mostly white stadiums and buildings that make up the Olympic Park.
They found inspiration for the Orbit in the Tower of Babel and Tatlin’s Tower, a helix-shaped mass of iron, glass and steel designed by the Russian artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin, but never built.
“We thought London needed a high-energy something,” Mr. Balmond said. “We thought this idea represents flux, change, and London is full of change, with various ethnic streams.”
Mr. Kapoor said he wanted the Orbit to be a collective, interactive experience. Visitors walk under a rust-colored, cone-shaped canopy entrance to elevators with viewing portals that carry them up to a two-story observation deck.
“Almost everything on the site is banal and horizontal,” Mr. Kapoor said. “I’m amazed they went with our object, with all its elbows sticking out.”
Mr. Kapoor’s signature style — characterized by bright colors, cloudlike shapes and distorting mirrors — is most evident in the Orbit’s bright red paint and the darkened, conical entrance, which he said he hoped felt “a little dangerous, a bit oppressive and slightly threatening.”
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Unlike other examples of public art, the Orbit needed a snack bar and a gift shop and is designed to please the masses of tourists who will want sweeping views of London to go with the Olympic revelry. The two elevators are equipped to carry as many as 770 visitors an hour up to the pair of observation platforms.
To descend the Orbit, visitors must meander along a winding, 1,150-foot staircase with 455 stairs. After the Olympics, the Orbit will serve as the centerpiece of a public pavilion with the capacity to host corporate events, gallery exhibitions and as many as one million visitors annually.
After its completion in May, Mr. Mittal donated the Orbit to the London Legacy Development Corporation, which will be responsible for transforming the Olympic Park into a housing development, complete with parks, retail space and a transformed aquatics center after the games.
The Orbit will sit in the center of a grassy pedestrian area. “The key to success here is that first and foremost it’s got to appeal to the local residents,” said Andrew Altman, chief executive of the development corporation.
In spite of all the grumbling around the city, that might not be too tough. After a friend described the Orbit as an eyesore, a Londoner, Benjamin Tucker, noted in a Twitter message that “it would take an awful lot to blight East London. Stratford’s a dump!”

The Queen of Diamonds
LONDON — The sparkle and splendor of royal diamonds, laced with stories of historic grandeur and family love, will go on show in Britain this summer. The diamond jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, to be celebrated publicly this weekend with a four-day festival, is being backed up by unprecedented disclosure of royal treasures from Buckingham Palace.
While cities and villages flutter with red, white and blue bunting and shop windows are decorated with objects incorporating the Union Jack, there is an easier and less uptight relationship between palace and people.
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In the same open spirit with which last year’s wedding of Catherine Middleton and Prince William, now Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, was celebrated with ceremony but not too much pomp, the big ease has reached the vaults of monarchy. Hence the unprecedented display of royal treasures.
“Diamonds: A Jubilee Celebration” will be on display from June 30 to July 8 and from July 31 to Oct. 7, as part of the summer at Buckingham Palace.
It will include some of the most iconic pieces, from the diamond diadem that started its royal life in 1821 peeping out under George IV’s swashbuckling velvet, ostrich-plumed hat and has since been worn by generations of British monarchs. It is the diadem most often seen on the current Queen’s head for royal occasions.
On display, too, will be jewels worn by Queen Victoria for her diamond jubilee and less stately and more personal pieces that have been altered to suit different moments in history, changing tastes and varied personalities. For example, because of a need to conceal a scar on the neck of the elegant young Princess Alexandra, a fashion for “dog collar” necklaces began. The young Princess Elizabeth, the current Queen, showed a penchant for flowers. The brooch she had made by Cartier in 1953 was a floral tribute to its central pink diamond from South Africa.
This month, “The Queen’s Diamonds,” the first authorized book about the royal jewels, has been published by Royal Collections Publications. Written by Hugh Roberts, Surveyor Emeritus of the Queen’s Works of Art, the book, with its sumptuous 348 illustrations including some double-fold pages of the jeweled tiaras, shows the rich heritage of the British royal family beginning with Queen Adelaide in the 1830s. Research notes even reveal how much the Queens Victoria, Mary, Alexandra and Elizabeth, the Queen mother, paid jewelers from Cartier or Garrard. A Garrard diamond tiara inspired by the Russian Kokoshnik headdress cost £4,400, a mighty sum in 1888.
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自由阅读
A focus on the visible wealth of the monarchy might be considered a spur to revolution in a country that is in the grip of austerity and that experienced rioting last year. But most of the treasures — like the bracelet that Prince Phillip gave to Princess Elizabeth on their marriage in 1947 — are not personal, but belong to the state.
The author’s scholarly information is laced with some intriguing tales of how Queen Mary, passionate equally about jewels and about royal history, stepped in to buy back family emeralds from her brother’s mistress after his death. Only the subject of the abdication of Edward VIII and the possibility that his future wife, Wallis Simpson, was given royal jewels still seems to be a taboo. Simpson, who became the Duchess of Windsor, is not even mentioned in the exhaustive index.
Inevitably, the rise of a new royal generation refreshes the image of monarchy — just as it did in 1981 when a beautiful young Diana married into the family, before the fairy tale imploded. The fact that Prince Charles’s current wife, Camilla, and Catherine, Prince William’s wife, have started to wear royal jewels, lent by Queen Elizabeth, is a symbol of the British royal family’s serenity after the storm.
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[attachimg=600,360]101823[/attachimg]
Human nature
Contents
? 1 Brief history of the concept
o 1.1 Socratic philosophy
o 1.2 Modernism
o 1.3 Natural science
? 2 Psychology and biology
o 2.1 Arguments for invariance
o 2.2 Arguments for social malleability
o 2.3 "Emotional amoral egoism”
越障
1.2 Modernism
One of the defining changes occurring at the end of the Middle Ages, is the end of the dominance of Aristotelian philosophy, and its replacement by a new approach to the study of nature, including human nature. In this approach, all attempts at conjecture about formal and final causes was rejected as useless speculation. Also, the term "law of nature" now applies any regular and predictable pattern in nature, not literally a law made by a divine law-maker, and in the same way "human nature" becomes not a special metaphysical cause, but simply whatever can be said to be typical tendencies of humans.
Although this new realism applied to the study of human life from the beginning, for example in Machiavelli's works, the definitive argument for the final rejection of Aristotle was associated especially with Francis Bacon, and then René Descartes, whose new approach returned philosophy or science to its pre-Socratic focus upon non-human things. Thomas Hobbes, then Giambattista Vico, and David Hume all claimed to be the first to properly use a modern Baconian scientific approach to human things.
Hobbes famously followed Descartes in describing humanity as matter in motion, just like machines. He also very influentially described man's natural state (without science and artifice) as one where life would be nasty, short and brutish. Following him, John Locke's philosophy of empiricism also saw human nature as a tabula rasa. In this view, the mind is at birth a "blank slate" without rules, so data is added, and rules for processing them are formed solely by our sensory experiences.
Jean Jacques Rousseau pushed the approach of Hobbes to an extreme and criticized it at the same time. He was a contemporary and acquaintance of Hume, writing before the French Revolution and long before Darwin and Freud. He shocked Western Civilization with his Second Discourse by proposing that humans had once been solitary animals, without reason or language or communities, and had developed these things due to accidents of pre-history. (A proposal which was also made, less famously, by Giambattista Vico.) In other words, Rousseau argued that human nature was not only not fixed, but not even approximately fixed compared to what had been assumed before him. Humans are political, and rational, and have language now, but originally they had none of these things.This in turn implied that living under the management of human reason might not be a happy way to live at all, and perhaps there is no ideal way to live. Rousseau is also unusual in the extent to which he took the approach of Hobbes, asserting that primitive humans were not even naturally social. A civilized human is therefore not only imbalanced and unhappy because of the mismatch between civilized life and human nature, but unlike Hobbes, Rousseau also became well known for the suggestion that primitive humans had been happier, "noble savages."
Rousseau's conception of human nature has been seen as the origin of many intellectual and political developments of the 19th and 20th centuries.He was an important influence upon Kant, Hegel and Marx, and the development of German Idealism, Historicism, and Romanticism.
What human nature did entail, according to Rousseau and the other modernists of the 17th and 18th centuries, were animal-like passions that led humanity to develop language and reasoning, and more complex communities (or communities of any kind according to Rousseau).
In contrast to Rousseau, David Hume was a critic of the over-simplifying and systematic approach of Hobbes and Rousseau and some others whereby, for example, all human nature is assumed to be driven by variations of selfishness. Influenced by Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, he argued against over-simplification. On the one hand he accepted that for many political and economic subjects people could be assumed to be driven by such simple selfishness, and he also wrote of some of the more social aspects of "human nature" as something which could be destroyed, for example if people did not associate in just societies. On the other hand he rejected what he called the "paradox of the sceptics" saying that no politician could have invented words like "'honourable' and 'shameful,' 'lovely' and 'odious,' 'noble' and 'despicable,'" unless there was not some natural "original constitution of the mind."
Hume, like Rousseau, was controversial in his own time for his modernist approach, following the example of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, of avoiding consideration of metaphysical explanations for any type of cause and effect. He was accused of being an atheist. Concerning human nature also, he wrote for example:
We needn't push our researches so far as to ask 'Why do we have humanity, i.e. a fellow-feeling with others?' It's enough that we experience this as a force in human nature. Our examination of causes must stop somewhere.
After Rousseau and Hume, the nature of philosophy and science changes, branching into different disciplines and approaches, and the study of human nature changes accordingly. Rousseau's proposal that human nature is malleable became a major influence upon international revolutionary movements of various kinds, while Hume's approach has been more typical in Anglo-Saxon countries including the United States.
1.3 Natural science
As the sciences concerned with humanity split up into more specialized branches, many of the key figures of this evolution expressed influential understandings about human nature.
Darwin gave a widely accepted scientific argument for what Rousseau had already argued from a different direction, that humans and other animal species have no truly fixed nature, at least in the very long term. However he also gave modern biology a new way of understanding how human nature does exist in a normal human time-frame, and how it is caused.
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, famously referred to the hidden pathological character of typical human behavior. He believed that the Marxists were right to focus on what he called "the decisive influence which the economic circumstances of men have upon their intellectual, ethical and artistic attitudes." But he thought that the Marxist view of the class struggle was too shallow, assigning to recent centuries conflicts that were, rather, primordial. Behind the class struggle, according to Freud, there stands the struggle between father and son, between established clan leader and rebellious challenger. Freud also popularized his notions of the id and the desires associated with each supposed aspect of personality.
E.O. Wilson's sociobiology and closely related theory of evolutionary psychology give scientific arguments against the "tabula rasa" hypotheses of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. In his book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), Edward O. Wilson claimed that it was time for a cooperation of all the sciences to explore human nature. He defined human nature as a collection of epigenetic rules: the genetic patterns of mental development. Cultural phenomena, rituals, etc. are products, not part of human nature. Artworks, for example are not part of human nature, but our appreciation of art is. And this art appreciation, or our fear for snakes, or incest taboo (Westermarck effect) can be studied by the methods of reductionism. Until now these phenomena were only part of psychological, sociological and anthropological studies. Wilson proposes it can be part of interdisciplinary research.
An example of this fear is discussed in the book An Instinct for Dragons, where anthropologist David E. Jones suggests a hypothesis that humans, just like other primates, have inherited instinctive reactions to snakes, large cats and birds of prey. Folklore dragons have features that are combinations of these three, which would explain why dragons with similar features occur in stories from independent cultures on all continents. Other authors have suggested that especially under the influence of drugs or in children's dreams, this instinct may give raise to fantasies and nightmares about dragons, snakes, spiders, etc., which makes these symbols popular in drug culture and in fairy tales for children. The traditional mainstream explanation to the folklore dragons does however not rely on human instinct, but on the assumption that fossils of, for example, dinosaurs gave rise to similar fantasies all over the world.
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jolene91

2.071.44
1.59
1.59
2.12


今晚看了加拿大留学生分尸的视频，震撼到久久不能平静。。在外的华人一定要珍重自己，为了家人。。

spencerX

饭饭的板凳！占一个

1:32
1:06
1:24
1:33
1:35

6:47

晨依Jacqueline

做得太晚了、自打ing……
读的好慢……
2‘22
2’11
2‘10
1’50
2‘24
1’14
饭饭的帖子每次都好好看~赞

Herisson0509

饭饭辛苦啦 还有插图 好好看
1:59
1:28
1:54
1:50
2:08
1:02
10:36

teddybearj4

占个饭饭酱的座位！辛苦饭饭！
伊丽莎白二世登基60周年哈~昨天才在凤凰卫视才看了一个有关女王的节目，饭饭的文章今天就出来啦！
——————————————————————————————
速度：
1'50    1'15     1'37    1'31     1'33
越障：9'41（原来越障不是讲英国女皇的啊……囧）
Main idea: i guess this series is an introduction about Human nature.
(It occurs to me that during a period of time, the signature of Sdcar NN is "It is humanity that keeps us briliant.", I am not sure whether this sentence is the exact one, but it almost express the meaning. Anyway, the humanity seems really important and essential for even B-school students to make a deep study.)
*1st part: modernism
Talk about several scholars's approaches of studying humanity related to modernism. (didn't quite catch the full content of this part)
*2nd part: nature science
The nature science has exert great influence to human nature. Some scientific discoveries , such as Darwin's evolutionary theory, psychoanalysis of someone, sociobiology findings, etc, argue the truth accknowledged before. At last, raise some examples to illustrate the position.

铁板神猴

辛苦啦~
1'53''
2'02''
1'57''
2'25''
2'05''
1'24''

9'00''

泾渭不凡

2.07
1.44
1.59
1.59
2.12


今晚看了加拿大留学生分尸的视频，震撼到久久不能平静。。在外的华人一定要珍重自己，为了家人。。

-- by 会员 jolene91 (2012/6/2 23:20:36)

愿灵安息。女孩纸，要有男盆友了，结伴出国结伴而行结伴避开妖孽。。。

泾渭不凡

饭饭辛苦啦 还有插图 好好看
1:59
1:28
1:54
1:50
2:08
1:02
10:36

-- by 会员 Herisson0509 (2012/6/3 10:18:11)

^v^~不辛苦~加油哈~喜欢插图哪？那饭饭以后看到好滴就传传~~

泾渭不凡

占个饭饭酱的座位！辛苦饭饭！
伊丽莎白二世登基60周年哈~昨天才在凤凰卫视才看了一个有关女王的节目，饭饭的文章今天就出来啦！
——————————————————————————————
速度：
1'50    1'15     1'37    1'31     1'33
越障：9'41（原来越障不是讲英国女皇的啊……囧）
Main idea: i guess this series is an introduction about Human nature.
(It occurs to me that during a period of time, the signature of Sdcar NN is "It is humanity that keeps us briliant.", I am not sure whether this sentence is the exact one, but it almost express the meaning. Anyway, the humanity seems really important and essential for even B-school students to make a deep study.)
*1st part: modernism
Talk about several scholars's approaches of studying humanity related to modernism. (didn't quite catch the full content of this part)
*2nd part: nature science
The nature science has exert great influence to human nature. Some scientific discoveries , such as Darwin's evolutionary theory, psychoanalysis of someone, sociobiology findings, etc, argue the truth accknowledged before. At last, raise some examples to illustrate the position.

-- by 会员 teddybearj4 (2012/6/3 10:32:36)

赞！！好认真！teddy亲加油~~~~
曾几何时，饭饭多么迷恋皇家。。。。。