1006G 备考日记 by qxn_1987——now

qxn_1987UID: 2610437

12.29(comments)

Charles Darwin, whose idea of the sacred also came from an English private school, witnessed religion at its most primordial when he went to Australia in 1836. He found it horrifying: “nearly naked figures, viewed by the light of blazing fires, all moving in hideous harmony…”

Whatever Darwin’s personal sensibilities, Mr Wade is convinced that a Darwinian approach offers the key to understanding religion. In other words, he sides with（与（某人）站在同一边，和（某人）抱同样的见解） those who think man’s propensity for religion has some adaptive function. According to this view, faith would not have persisted over thousands of generations if it had not helped the human race to survive. Among evolutionary biologists, this idea is contested. Critics of religion, like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, suggest that faith is a useless (or worse) by-product of other human characteristics.

Of course, the picture is muddied by the vast changes that religion went through in the journey from tribal dancing to Anglican hymns. The advent of settled, agricultural societies, at least 10,000 years ago, led to a new division of labour, in which priestly（僧的，僧侣似的） castes tried to monopolise access to the divine, and the authorities sought to control sacred ecstasy.

Still, the modifications that religion has undergone should not, in Mr Wade’s view, distract from the study of faith’s basic functions. In what way, then, does religion enhance a group’s survival? Above all, by promoting moral rules and cementing cohesion, in a way that makes people ready to sacrifice themselves for the group and to deal ruthlessly with outsiders. These arguments are well made. Mr Wade has a clear mind and limpid prose style which guides the reader almost effortlessly through 200 years of intellectual history. Perhaps, though, he oversimplifies the link between morality, in the sense of obedience to rules, and group solidarity based on common participation in ecstatic rites.

All religion is concerned in varying degrees with metaphysical（形而上学的，纯粹哲学的，超自然的） ideas, moral norms and mystical experience. But in the great religions, the moral and the mystical have often been in tension. The more a religion stresses ecstasy, the less it seems hidebound by rules—especially rules of public behaviour, as opposed to purely religious norms. And religious movements (from the “Deuteronomists” of ancient Israel to the English Puritans) that emphasise moral norms tend to eschew the ecstatic.

Max Weber, one of the fathers of religious sociology, contrasted the transcendental feelings enjoyed by Catholic mass-goers with the Protestant obsession with behaviour. In Imperial Russia, Peter the Great tried to pull the Russian Orthodox church from the former extreme to the latter: to curb its love of rite and mystery and make it more of a moral agency like the Lutheran churches of northern Europe. He failed. Russians liked things mystical, and they didn’t like being told what to do.

As well as giving an elegant summary of modern thinking about religion, Mr Wade also offers a brief, provocative history of monotheism. He endorses the radical view that the story of the Jews’ flight from Egypt is myth, rather than history. He sympathises with daring ideas about Islam’s beginnings: so daring that many of its proponents work under false names. In their view, Islam（伊斯兰教（在中国旧称回教，清真教）） is more likely to have emerged from dissident Christian（基督教（的），信徒，信基督教的） sects in the Levant than to have “burst out of （冲出，用力解脱）Arabia”, as the Muslim version of sacred history teaches.



Comments:

This passage is a little abstract for me to some extent. It seems more mainly about Nicholas Wade’s opinion or theory on religion and his book.

As for religion, different people have different opinions, Wade tried to explain the survival and evolvement of religion by dint of Darwin's evolutionary theory. Furthermore, different people have different religions of their own; and the religion plays different roles in different people’s psychological life, though their religion may be the same.

Since the topic is so hypersensitive and serious, it would be not better for me to say too much.

qxn_1987UID: 2610437

12.29
咕~~(╯﹏╰)b。。呃。。
偏头疼下午睡到5点多。。。一下午就这么没了，心疼！！
期待小组计划中。。。

qxn_1987UID: 2610437

12.30(comments)

“insist on accountability at every level” for failures in security.

The president was told during a private briefing on Tuesday morning while vacationing here in Hawaii that the government had a variety of information in its possession before the thwarted bombing that would have been a clear warning sign had it been shared among agencies, a senior official said.

Two officials said the government had intelligence from Yemen before Friday that leaders of a branch of Al Qaeda there were talking about “a Nigerian” being prepared for a terrorist attack. While the information did not include a name, officials said it would have been evident had it been compared with information about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian charged with（控告） trying to blow up（使充气，爆炸，放大） a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit on Christmas Day.

Some of the information was partial or incomplete, and it was not obvious that it was connected, the official said, but in retrospect it now appears clear that had it all been examined together it would have pointed to the pending attack. The official said the administration was “increasingly confident” that Al Qaeda had a role in the attack, as the group’s Yemeni branch has publicly claimed.

Shortly after being briefed, Mr. Obama addressed reporters in his second public statement on the matter in two days, announcing that a review already had revealed a breakdown in the intelligence system that did not properly identify the suspect as a dangerous extremist who should have been prevented from flying to the United States.

“A systemic failure has occurred, and I consider that totally unacceptable,” Mr. Obama said. He said he had ordered government agencies to give him a preliminary report on Thursday about what happened and added that he would “insist on accountability at every level,” although he did not elaborate.

Mr. Obama alluded to the intelligence in his statement. “Had this critical information been shared, it could have been compiled with other intelligence and a fuller, clearer picture of the suspect would have emerged,” the president said. “The warning signs would have triggered red flags, and the suspect would have never been allowed to board that plane for America.”

The president’s withering assessment of the government’s performance could reshape the intensifying political debate over the thwarted terrorist attack. Instead of defending the system, Mr. Obama sided with critics who complained that it did not work and positioned himself as a reformer who will fix it. At the same time, the decision to speak a second time after remaining out of sight for three days underscores the administration’s concern over being outflanked on national security.

The president praised the professionalism of the nation’s intelligence, counterterrorism, homeland security and law enforcement officials. But he spared little in his sharp judgment about how a known extremist could be allowed to board a flight bound for the United States after his own father had warned that he had become radical.

“There was a mix of human and systemic failures that contributed to this potential catastrophic breach of security,” Mr. Obama told reporters at the Marine Corps base at Kaneohe Bay outside Honolulu, near his vacation home in Kailua. “We need to learn from this episode and act quickly to fix the flaws in our system because our security is at stake and lives are at stake.”

Mr. Obama suggested that he would overhaul the watch-list system. “We’ve achieved much since 9/11 in terms of collecting information that relates to terrorists and potential terrorist attacks,” he said. “But it’s becoming clear that the system that has been in place for years now is not sufficiently up to date to take full advantage of the information we collect and the knowledge we have.”

“It now appears that weeks ago this information was passed to a component of our intelligence community but was not effectively distributed so as to get the suspect’s name on a no-fly list,” Mr. Obama said of the father’s warning. “There appears to be other deficiencies as well. Even without this one report, there were bits of information available within the intelligence community that could have and should have been pieced together.”

“All year long, we’ve asked the question: What is the administration’s overarching strategy to confront the terrorist threat and keep America safe?” Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the Republican leader, said in a statement Tuesday. “We haven’t gotten a satisfactory answer, and the secretary’s ‘the system worked’ response doesn’t inspire confidence.”

Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, has blocked the appointment, saying he was worried Mr. Southers might allow T.S.A. workers to join labor unions. “Republicans have decided to play politics（弄权） with this nomination by blocking final confirmation,” Mr. Reid said.

Mr. DeMint said he was seeking an opportunity to debate the nomination rather than have it approved without discussion, and he accused Mr. Reid of grandstanding. “Senator Reid completely ignored this nominee until the recent terror attempt,” Mr. DeMint said, “and now he’s trying to show concern for airport security.”


Comments:

To be honest, until I read this report today, did I know this terrorist attack since 9/11. It is no denying that it has caused a panic again while not every change, pain or panic wrought by the 9/11 is reversed.

Would the terrorist attack have been avoided, if the intelligence syetem had paid enough improtance to Mr. Abdulmutalla’s father’s warning. So, as to this affair, Mr. Obama sided with critics who complained that the intelligence syetem which had some deficiencies—in their opinion, had not worked effectively and properly. Admittedly, this view is true and could demonstrate some problems to some extent, nonetheless, it would be so difficult to check all 550,000 people with possible ties to terrorism, on the other hand.

qxn_1987UID: 2610437

12.30
中午一年一次的传统聚餐吞噬了我N久的时间。。
恩。。Be strong!!

qxn_1987UID: 2610437

12.31(comments)

Judging from the scientists I know, including Eva and Ruth, and those whom I've read about, you can't pursue the laws of nature very long without bumping into beauty. "I don't know if it's the same beauty you see in the sunset," a friend tells me, "but it feels the same." This friend is a physicist, who has spent a long career deciphering what must be happening in the interior of stars. He recalls for me his thrill on grasping for the first time Dirac's equations describing quantum mechanics, or those of Einstein describing relativity. "They're so beautiful," he says, "you can see immediately they have to be true. Or at least on the way toward truth." I ask him what makes a theory beautiful, and he replies, "Simplicity, symmetry, elegance, and power."

Why nature should conform to theories we find beautiful is far from obvious. The most incomprehensible thing about the universe, as Einstein said, is that it's comprehensible. How unlikely, that a short-lived biped on a two-bit（微不足道的，廉价的） planet should be able to gauge the speed of light, lay bare the structure of an atom, or calculate the gravitational tug of a black hole. We're a long way from understanding everything, but we do understand a great deal about how nature behaves. Generation after generation, we puzzle out formulas, test them, and find, to an astonishing degree, that nature agrees. An architect draws designs on flimsy paper, and her buildings stand up through earthquakes. We launch a satellite into orbit and use it to bounce messages from continent to continent. The machine on which I write these words embodies hundreds of insights into the workings of the material world, insights that are confirmed by every burst of letters on the screen, and I stare at that screen through lenses that obey the laws of optics first worked out in detail by Isaac Newton.

By discerning patterns in the universe, Newton believed, he was tracing the hand of God. Scientists in our day have largely abandoned the notion of a Creator as an unnecessary hypothesis, or at least an untestable one. While they share Newton's faith that the universe is ruled everywhere by a coherent set of rules, they cannot say, as scientists, how these particular rules came to govern things. You can do science without believing in a divine Legislator, but not without believing in laws.

I spent my teenage years scrambling up the mountain of mathematics. Midway up the slope, however, I staggered to a halt, gasping in the rarefied air, well before I reached the heights where the equations of Einstein and Dirac would have made sense. Nowadays I add, subtract, multiply, and do long division when no calculator is handy, and I can do algebra and geometry and even trigonometry in a pinch（在紧要关头，必要时）, but that is about all that I've kept from the language of numbers. Still, I remember glimpsing patterns in mathematics that seemed as bold and beautiful as a skyful of stars.

I'm never more aware of the limitations of language than when I try to describe beauty. Language can create its own loveliness, of course, but it cannot deliver to us the radiance we apprehend in the world, any more than a photograph can capture the stunning swiftness of a hawk or the withering power of a supernova. Eva's wedding album holds only a faint glimmer of the wedding itself. All that pictures or words can do is gesture beyond themselves toward the fleeting glory that stirs our hearts. So I keep gesturing.

"All nature is meant to make us think of paradise," Thomas Merton observed. Because the Creation puts on a nonstop show, beauty is free and inexhaustible, but we need training in order to perceive more than the most obvious kinds. Even fifteen billion years or so after the Big Bang, echoes of that event still linger in the form of background radiation, only a few degrees above absolute zero. Just so, I believe, the experience of beauty is an echo of the order and power that permeate the universe. To measure background radiation, we need subtle instruments; to measure beauty, we need alert intelligence and our five keen senses.

Anyone with eyes can take delight in（乐于） a face or a flower. You need training, however, to perceive the beauty in mathematics or physics or chess, in the architecture of a tree, the design of a bird's wing, or the shiver of breath through a flute. For most of human history, the training has come from elders who taught the young how to pay attention. By paying attention, we learn to savor all sorts of patterns, from quantum mechanics to patchwork quilts.

This predilection brings with it a clear evolutionary advantage, for the ability to recognize patterns helped our ancestors to select mates, find food, avoid predators. But the same advantage would apply to all species, and yet we alone compose symphonies and crossword puzzles（纵横拼字谜）, carve stone into statues, map time and space. Have we merely carried our animal need for shrewd perceptions to an absurd extreme? Or have we stumbled onto a deep congruence between the structure of our minds and the structure of the universe?

I am persuaded the latter is true. I am convinced there's more to beauty than biology, more than cultural convention. It flows around and through us in such abundance, and in such myriad forms, as to exceed by a wide margin any mere evolutionary need. Which is not to say that beauty has nothing to do with survival: I think it has everything to do with survival. Beauty feeds us from the same source that created us. It reminds us of the shaping power that reaches through the flower stem and through our own hands. It restores our faith in the generosity of nature. By giving us a taste of the kinship between our own small minds and the great Mind of the Cosmos, beauty reassures us that we are exactly and wonderfully made for life on this glorious planet, in this magnificent universe. I find in that affinity a profound source of meaning and hope. A universe so prodigal of beauty may actually need us to notice and respond, may need our sharp eyes and brimming hearts and teeming minds, in order to close the circuit of Creation.


Comments:

I am astound at the article since it is so beatuiful, compelling, and vivid, at least so in my personal poinion.

Admittedly, we live in a world full of a beauty that breaks through every through pore of God’s own earth. We know that this is so, but all too often we turn a blind eye to this, which is so easily be ignored. So we need training to perceive the beauty through paying more attention. Only through this way, can we learn to savor all sorts of patterns of beauty, “from quantum mechanics to patchwork quilts.”

qxn_1987UID: 2610437

12.31
09最后一天。。
加油！！

海王泪UID: 2673613

Q～～新年快乐！！！
在新的一年里，一起加油！

qxn_1987UID: 2610437

Q～～新年快乐！！！
在新的一年里，一起加油！
海王泪 发表于 2010-1-1 00:03

恩！！:hug: 嘻。。

plukaUID: 2721764

新年来串门，加油加油！

qxn_1987UID: 2610437

12.31(comments)

Canada is a northern nation. “O Canada”, the national anthem（国歌）, speaks of “true north, strong and free”. But for most Canadians, 80% of whom live within 200km (124 miles) of the United States border, the Far North (Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut) is a vast area never visited, largely unknown, usually forgotten and populated only by aboriginal peoples with quaint customs. All that will start to change in 2010.

Pangnirtung, population 1,300, on the east coast of Baffin Island, a settlement mostly known for Inuit art and a nearby national park, will see construction start on a C$42m ($40.5m) harbour for the small Inuit fishing fleet（渔船队）. At Gjoa Haven, the only settlement on King William Island, cabins used by polar-bear researchers will be upgraded. At Eureka, on Ellesmere Island, an atmospheric laboratory will be overhauled. At Iqaluit, capital of the Nunavut territory, tens of millions of dollars will be spent on badly needed housing, a research institute and a research vessel.

Add to that oil and gas exploration in the Beaufort Sea; C$100m for social housing; the same sum for geology research; another C$90m for economic-development projects; C$85m to improve Arctic research stations. The result is activity such as the Far North, from Alaska in the west to Baffin Bay in the east, has never before seen. And still to come—delayed by debilitating squabbles among Canada’s shipbuilders and the usual cost overruns of military projects—are three Arctic patrol ships and a polar icebreaker, plus the publication of plans for a deep-water port at Nanisivik, on the north coast of Baffin Island. Later in the year, if all goes according to plan, the federal government will select a community that will get a High Arctic Research Station.

During the cold war, Canada and the United States constructed a Distant Early-Warning detection system against any attack by Soviet bombers. Apart from this DEW line, Canada paid little heed militarily to the Far North. Soviet and American submarines roamed under the Arctic ice without Canada having any ability to monitor them. The Canadian government outfitted a few Inuit with baseball hats and rifles, called them Rangers, and forgot about the region.

Now, the rush is on to discover the Far North, quite literally in the sense of research into atmosphere, ice and animals; and more urgently to get ready for the widening of sea lanes caused by global warming. Higher temperatures mean less sea ice and more scope for mineral and fossil-fuel exploration, more foreign ships traversing the north, and potential conflicts with other Arctic states over the seabed, sea lanes（海中航线）, and sea and land borders.

Canada’s belated interest in its Far North is somewhat ironic given that climate change has hit the Far North harder than any other part of the Earth, and yet Canada’s record in curbing greenhouse-gas emissions is the worst in the G8. In the Kyoto climate-change protocol, Canada pledged to reduce emissions by 6% from 1990 levels by 2008-12; instead, emissions have risen by 27% and will rise again in 2010, especially if development intensifies in the tar sands of Alberta.

No matter who governs Canada in 2010—the country’s fractured political system has thrown up a series of unstable governments—all parties agree that the rush to research, develop and protect the Far North has become a national priority. The Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, made the Far North one of his signature issues after being elected in 2006. That the other parties now agree with this priority, without giving him any credit of course, means that the days of benign neglect of the Far North are over.


Comments:

Nowadays, one phenomenon is calling for people’s more attention, i.e., the changing of climate, which is caused by superfluous Carbon-dioxide emissions. You needn’t have to go too far to see the effects of climate change, and the Arctic is serving as an apt example of climate change. And so far the effort to tackle global warming has achieved little.

Ironically, instead of curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, Canada, whereas, is using the climate change to plan to pursue benefits---such as more scope for mineral and fossile-fuel, more wider sea lanes---from Far North, while other countries are working together and fighting tooth-and-nail to solve the global problem. And that is the right reason why the government don’t neglect the Far North any more.

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

Q~新年快乐！
加油加油！！

qxn_1987UID: 2610437

01.01
今天同学过来了，呃。。
偏头疼厉害。。还是先撤吧。。

qxn_1987UID: 2610437

01.02(comments)

HOW much our world of moving-image entertainment has changed in the past decade! We now live in a world of the 24-Hour Movie, one that plays anytime and anywhere you want (and sometimes whether you want it to or not). It’s a movie we can access at home by pressing a few buttons on the remote (and agreeing to pay more for it than you might at the local video store) or with a few clicks of the mouse. The 24-Hour Movie now streams instead of unspools, filling our screens with images that, more and more, have been created algorithmically rather than photographically.

And yet how little our world of moving-image entertainment has changed! On April 14, 1896, The New York Times ran an article with the exciting if cryptic headline “Edison’s Latest Triumph.” The triumph was the Vitascope（老式放映机）, a machine that “projects upon a large area of canvas groups that appear to stand forth from the canvas, and move with great facility and agility, as though actuated by separate impulses.” A proprietor of the music hall（杂耍戏院）where the Vitascope was shown off said this machine would reproduce “scenes from various successful plays and operas of the season, and well-known statesmen and celebrities,” adding, “No other manager in this city will have the right to exhibit the Vitascope.”

Today, even when digital, our movies are still filled with celebrities and scenes from successful plays (and books and comics), and the owners of image technologies continue to hold on to their exclusive rights（专有权，专营权利）
ferociously. Edison didn’t invent the Vitascope, but that’s another story. The story I want to tell here does involve him. But first I want to fast-forward to a recent night when, at a movie theater rigged（作弊的，非法操纵的） for 3-D projection, I saw James Cameron’s “Avatar” with an audience that watched the screen with the kind of fixed attention that has become rare at the movies. True, everyone was wearing 3-D glasses, which makes it difficult to check your cellphone obsessively, but they also seemed captivated.

When it was over, people broke into enthusiastic applause and, unusually, many stayed to watch the credits（呃，终于理解-----影视节目中列出的、参与制作的人员名单）, as if to linger in the movie. Although much has been made of the technologies used in “Avatar,” its beauty and nominal politics, it is the social experience of the movie — as an event that needs to be enjoyed with other people for maximum impact — which is more interesting. That’s particularly true after a decade when watching movies became an increasingly solitary affair, something between you and your laptop. “Avatar” affirms the deep pleasures of the communal, and it does so by exploiting a technology (3-D), which appears to invite you into the movie even as it also forces you to remain attentively in your seat.

“Avatar” serves as a nice jumping-off point（起点，出发点） to revisit how movies and our experience of them have changed. For starters, when a critic calls a new release “a film” these days, there’s a chance that what she (and you) are looking at wasn’t made with film processes but was created, from pre-visualization to final credits, with digital technologies. 【Yet, unless a director or distributor（发行人） calls attention to the technologies used — as do techno-fetishists like Michael Mann and David Fincher, who used bleeding-edge digital cameras to make “Collateral” (2004) and “Zodiac” (2007) — it’s also probable that most reviewers won’t mention if a movie was even shot in digital, because they haven’t noticed or don’t care.】

This seems like a strange state of affairs. Film is profoundly changing — or, if you believe some theorists and historians, is already dead— something that most moviegoers（常看电影的人） don’t know. Yet, because the visible evidence of this changeover has become literally hard to see, and because the implications are difficult to grasp, it is also understandable why the shift to digital has not attracted more intense analysis outside film and media studies. Bluntly put, something is happening before our eyes. 【We might see an occasional digital artifact (usually, a bit of unintentional data) when a director shoots digital in bright light — look for a pattern of squares or a yellowish（微黄的） tint — but we’re usually too busy with the story to pay much mind.】

Should you care? I honestly don’t know, because I’m not sure what to think about this brave new image world we have entered. I love the luxurious look and warmth of film, and I fervently hope it never disappears. And yet many of us who grew up watching movies in the predigital era have rarely experienced the ones in, and shown on, film in all their visual glory: battered（打扁了的，敲碎的） prints and bad projection have helped thwart the ideal experience. Theater 80 St. Marks, a downtown Manhattan repertory house where I spent a lot of time in the 1970s, showed threadbare prints of classic and not-so-classic movies in rear projection, which meant they often looked worse on screen than they did on my television back home.

It is because the movies and our experience of them has changed so radically
in recent years — we can pull a movie out of our pocket now, much as earlier generations pulled out a paperback— that makes it difficult to grasp what is happening. 【In 1996, Susan Sontag set off a storm in cine-circles with an essay, “The Decay of Cinema,” which could have been titled the death of specialized cinephilia, one centered on art-house film (“quintessentially（精粹地，精髓地 a.quintessential）modern”), from Dziga Vertov to Jean-Luc Godard, and experienced inside a movie theater, “ideally the third-row center.” Sontag’s essay inspired a spate of similarly themed if often less vigorous examinations: Google the words “death of cinema,” and you get more than 2.5 million hits. 】

In one sense the beginning of the end of cinema as we tend to understand it can be traced to 1933, the year that a feature-length film — a 1932 detective tale called “The Crooked Circle” — was first shown on television. Few Americans owned sets in the 1930s, but the genie was already out of the bottle, or, rather, the movies were out of the theater. As televisions began to fill postwar（战后的） American homes — from an estimated 20,000 in 1946 to 30.5 million in 1955 — so did the movies, which, despite Hollywood’s initial anxiety, became a crucial television staple. (The studios soon learned that television was a revenue source.) Generations of cinephiles（电影爱好者，影迷） fell in love with the object of their obsession while flopped on the floor, basking in the glow of the family television.

In “The Virtual Life of Film,” an elegant 2007 inquiry into the past, present and future of film, the theorist D. N. Rodowick writes, “All that was chemical and photographic is disappearing into the electronic and digital.” Film captures moments in time, preserving them spatially in images we can root around in, get lost in. Digital delivers data, zeroes and ones that are transformed into images, and this is a difference to contemplate. The truth is that the film object has already changed, from preproduction to projection. And the traditional theatrical experience that shaped how viewers looked at film and, by extension, the world, has been mutating for some time. The new types of image consumption and digital technologies have complicated our understanding of cinema.

It’s also a good bet that this teenager also watches movies in theaters. If she goes to “Avatar,” she will see a movie that, despite its exotic beauty, seems familiar, even in 3-D. Narrative cinema employs devices, from camera placement to editing, that direct your attention and, if the movie is successful and you fall under（受到（影响等），被归入） its sway, lock you into the story. Mr. Cameron might be a visionary of a type, but he’s an old-fashioned (and canny) storyteller and he locks you in tightly. The 3-D images are often spectacular, and his characters, like the figures in that 1896 Edison film, “appear to stand forth from the canvas, and move with great facility and agility, as though actuated by separate impulses.”


Comments:

As the technology develops dramatically, our patterns of life also change radically. Digital technology is one of the examples, such as 3-D images.

Obviously, a lot of us adores movies, and many are cinephiles. Even though, bruntly put, most people don’t grasp that fim is profoundly changing, including moviegoers. There are several reasons account for this phenomenon, as far as I’m concerned.

Frist, we pay more attention to the content of the movie, instead of technology used in the movie; we are usually too busy with the story to pay much mind. Second, there are numerous ways and implements to watch a movie as the development of high-tech, such as laptop, TV, and hand-held devices---MP4, PSP. Last but not least, our understanding of cinema have been complicated by the new types of image consumption and digital technologies.

Anyhow, watch a movie in a theater will be a wonderful, spectacular and completely different experience.

qxn_1987UID: 2610437

01.01(comments)

Canada is a northern nation. “O Canada”, the national anthem（国歌）, speaks of “true north, strong and free”. But for most Canadians, 80% of whom live within 200km (124 miles) of the United States border, the Far North (Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut) is a vast area never visited, largely unknown, usually forgotten and populated only by aboriginal peoples with quaint customs. All that will start to change in 2010.

Pangnirtung, population 1,300, on the east coast of Baffin Island, a settlement mostly known for Inuit art and a nearby national park, will see construction start on a C$42m ($40.5m) harbour for the small Inuit fishing fleet（渔船队）. At Gjoa Haven, the only settlement on King William Island, cabins used by polar-bear researchers will be upgraded. At Eureka, on Ellesmere Island, an atmospheric laboratory will be overhauled. At Iqaluit, capital of the Nunavut territory, tens of millions of dollars will be spent on badly needed housing, a research institute and a research vessel.

Add to that oil and gas exploration in the Beaufort Sea; C$100m for social housing; the same sum for geology research; another C$90m for economic-development projects; C$85m to improve Arctic research stations. The result is activity such as the Far North, from Alaska in the west to Baffin Bay in the east, has never before seen. And still to come—delayed by debilitating squabbles among Canada’s shipbuilders and the usual cost overruns of military projects—are three Arctic patrol ships and a polar icebreaker, plus the publication of plans for a deep-water port at Nanisivik, on the north coast of Baffin Island. Later in the year, if all goes according to plan, the federal government will select a community that will get a High Arctic Research Station.

During the cold war, Canada and the United States constructed a Distant Early-Warning detection system against any attack by Soviet bombers. Apart from this DEW line, Canada paid little heed militarily to the Far North. Soviet and American submarines roamed under the Arctic ice without Canada having any ability to monitor them. The Canadian government outfitted a few Inuit with baseball hats and rifles, called them Rangers, and forgot about the region.

Now, the rush is on to discover the Far North, quite literally in the sense of research into atmosphere, ice and animals; and more urgently to get ready for the widening of sea lanes caused by global warming. Higher temperatures mean less sea ice and more scope for mineral and fossil-fuel exploration, more foreign ships traversing the north, and potential conflicts with other Arctic states over the seabed, sea lanes（海中航线）, and sea and land borders.

Canada’s belated interest in its Far North is somewhat ironic given that climate change has hit the Far North harder than any other part of the Earth, and yet Canada’s record in curbing greenhouse-gas emissions is the worst in the G8. In the Kyoto climate-change protocol, Canada pledged to reduce emissions by 6% from 1990 levels by 2008-12; instead, emissions have risen by 27% and will rise again in 2010, especially if development intensifies in the tar sands of Alberta.

No matter who governs Canada in 2010—the country’s fractured political system has thrown up a series of unstable governments—all parties agree that the rush to research, develop and protect the Far North has become a national priority. The Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, made the Far North one of his signature issues after being elected in 2006. That the other parties now agree with this priority, without giving him any credit of course, means that the days of benign neglect of the Far North are over.


Comments:

Nowadays, one phenomenon is calling for people’s more attention, i.e., the changing of climate, which is caused by superfluous Carbon-dioxide emissions. You needn’t have to go too far to see the effects of climate change, and the Arctic is serving as an apt example of climate change. And so far the effort to tackle global warming has achieved little.

Ironically, instead of curbing greenhouse-gas emissions, Canada, whereas, is using the climate change to plan to pursue benefits---such as more scope for mineral and fossile-fuel, more wider sea lanes---from Far North, while other countries are working together and fighting tooth-and-nail to solve the global problem. And that is the right reason why the government don’t neglect the Far North any more.

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01.02
呃。。刚发现，昨天偏头疼，01.01comments没发就撤了。。
快考试了。。
加油！！！
期待小组计划中。。