[文科学习] 初中家长新4学习记录贴--48课，目标10周完成！

Fortunately, there is a 'uniquely rational way' for us to communicate with other intelligent beings, as Walter Sullivan has put it in his excellent book, We are not along. This depends on the precise radio frequency of the 21-cm wavelength, or 1420 megacycles per second. It is the nature frequency of emission of the hydrogen atoms in space and was discovered by us in 1951; it must be known  to any kind of radio astronomer in the universe.

Once the existence of this wave-length had been discovered, it was not long before its use at the uniquely recognizable broadcasting frequency for interstellar communication was suggested. Without something of this kind, searching for intelligences on other panets would be like trying to meet a friend in London without a pre-arranged rendezvous and absurdly wondering the streets in the hope of a chance encounter.

Lesson 44 Patterns of culture

What influences us from the moment of birth?

Custom has not commonly been regarded as a subject of any great moment. The inner working of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behaviour at its most  commonplace. As a matter of fact, it is the way around. Traditional custom, taken the world over, is a mass of detailed behaviour more astonishing than what any one person can ever evolve in individual actions, no matter how aberrant. Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter. The fact of first-rate importance is the predominant role that custom plays in experience and in belief, and the very great varieties it may manifest.

No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He see it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinkin.g. Even in his philosophical  probings he cann't go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs. John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the behaviour of the individual, as against  any way in which he can affect traditional custom, is as the propotion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue against those words of his baby talk and are taken into the vernacular of his family. When one seriously studies the social orders that have had the opportunity to develop autonomously,  the figure becomes no more than an exact and matter of fact ovservation. The life of history of the individual is first and foremost  an accommodation to the pattens and starndards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth,  the customs into which he is born shape his experiance and behaviour. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities. Every child that is born into his group will sharethem with him, and no child born into one on the oppisite side of the globe can ever achieve the thousandth part. There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand than this of the role of custom. Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.

The study of custome can be profitable only after certain preliminary propositions have been accepted, and some of these propositions have been violently opposed. In the first place, any scientific study requires that there be no preferential weighting of one or another of the items in the series it selects for its consideration. In all the less controversical fields, like the study of cacti or termites or the nature of nebulae, the necessary of method of study is to group the relevant material and to take note of all possible variant forms and conditions. Int his way, we have learned all that we know of the laws of astronomy, or of the habits of the social insects, let us say. It is only in the study of man himself that the major social sciences have substituted the study of one local variation, that of Westen civilization.

Anthropology was by definition impossible, as long as these distinctionss between ourselves and the primitive, ourselve and the barbarian, ourselves and the pagan, held sway over people's minds. It was necessary first to arrive at that degree of sophistication where we no longer set our own belief against our neighbour's superstition. It was necessary to recognize that these institutions which are based on the same premises, lets say the supernatural, must be considered together, our own among the rest.

Lesson 45 Of men and galaxies

What is the most influential factor in any human society?

dispute
mosquito
subdue
drainge
envision
Morocco

latitude
heretic
conceive
suffice
nulear
original

Coming, good morning

In man's early days, competition with other creatures must have been critical. But this phase of our development is now finished. Indeed, we lack practice and experience nowadays in dealing with primitive conditions. I am sure that, without modern weapons, I would make a very poor show of defending the ownership of a cave with a bear, and in this I do not think that I stand alone. The last creature to compete with man was the mosquito. But even the mosquito has been subdued by attention to dranage and by chemical sprays.

Competition between ourselves, person against person, community against community, still persists, however; and it is as fierce as it ever was.

But the competition of man against man is not the simple process envisioned in boilogy. It is not a simple competition for a fixed amount of food determinded by the physical envoinment, because the environment that determines our evolution is no longer essentially physical. Our environment is chiefly conditioned by the things we believe. Morocco and California are bits of the Earth in very similar latitudes, both on the west coast of continents with similar climates, and probably  natural resourses. Yet their present development is wholly different, not so much because of different people even, but beacuse of the different thoughts that exist in the minds of their inhabitants. This is the point I wish to emphasize. The most important factor in our environment is the state of our own minds.

It is well known that where the white man has invaded a primitive culture, the most destructive effects have come not from physical weapons but from physical weapons but from ideas.

Ideas are dangerous. The Holly Office knew this full well when it caused heretics to be burned in days gone by. Indeed, the concept of free speech on exists in our moderne society because when you are inside a community, you are conditioned by the conventions of the community to such a degree that is it is very differicult to conveive of anything really destructive.

家长好好学习，孩子天天向上！赞！

Coming, good morning, my parents friends!

It is only someone looking from outside tha can inject the dangerous thoughts. I do not doubt that it would be possible to inject ideas into the modern world  that would utterly destroy us. i would like to give you an example, but fortunately I cannt do so. Perhaps it will suffice to mention the nuclear bomb, of making it aware of the possibility, of supplying sufficient details to enable the thing to be contructed. Twenty or thirty pages of information handed to any of the major world powers around the year 1925 would have been sufficient to change the course of world history.

It is a strange thoght, but I believe a correct one, that twenty or thirty pages of ideas and information would be capable of turning the present-day world upside down, or even destroying it. I have often tried to conceive of what those pages might contain, but of cause I can't do so because I am a presioner of the present-day world. Just as all of you are. We can't talk ouside the particular patterns taht our brains are conditioned to , or, to be more accurate, we can think only a very little way outside, and then only if we are very original.

Lesson 46 Hobbies

Who, according to the author, are 'Fortune's favoured children'?

A gifted American psychologist has said, 'Worry is a spasm of the emotion; the mind catches hold of something and will not let it go.' It is useless to argue with the mind in this condition. The stronger the will, the more futile task. One can only gently insinuate something else into its convulsive grasp. And if this something else is rightly chosen, if it is really attended by the illumination of another field of interest, gradually, and often quite swiftly, the old undue grip relaxes and the process of recuperation and repair begins.

The cultivation of a hobby and new forms of interest is therefore a policy of the first importance to a pubic man. But this is not a business that can be undertaken in a day or swiftly improvised by a  mere command of the will. The growth of alternative mental interestes is a long process. The seeds must be carefully chosen; then must fall on good ground; they must be sedulously tended; if the vivifying fruits are to be at hand when needed.

Here I am!

To be really happy and really safe, one ought to have at least two or three hobbies, and they must all be real. It is no use starting late lin life to say:' i will take an interest in this or that'. Such an attempt only aggravates the strain of mental effort. A man may acquire great knowledge of topics unconnected with his daily work, and get get hardly any benefit or relief. It is no use doing what you like, you have to got to like what you do. Broadly speaking, human beings may be divided into three classes: those who are toiled to death, those who are worried to death, and those who are bored to death. It's no use offering the manual labourer, tired out with a hard week's sweat and effort, the chance of playing a game of football or baseball on Saturday afternoon. It's no use inviting the politician or the professional or business man, who has been working or worrying about serious things for six days, to work or worry about trifling things at the weekend.

As for the unfortunate people who can command everything they want, who can gratify every caprice and lay their hands on almost every object of desire--for them a new pleasure, a new excitement is only an additional satiation. In vain they rush frantically round from place to place, trying to escape from avenging boredom by mere clatter and motion. For them discipline in one form or another is the most helpful path.

It may also be said that rational, industrious, useful human beings are divided into two classes; first, those whose work is work and whose pleasure is pleasure; and secondly, those whose work and pleasure are one. Of these the former are the majority. They have their compensations. The long hours in the office or the factory bring with them as their reward, not only the means of sustenance, but a keen appetite for pleasure even in its simplest and most modest forms. But fortune's favoured children belong to the sencond class. Their life is a natural harmony. For them the working hours are never long enough. Each day is a holiday, and ordinary holidays, when they come, are grudged as enforced interruptions in an absorbing vocation. Yet to both classes, the need of alternative outlook, of a change of atmosphere, of a diversion of effort, is essential. Indeed, it may well be that those whose work is their pleasure are those  who most need the means of banishing it at intervals from their minds.

好努力的家长

Good morning, pouring rain, finally in office!

Lesson 46 Hobbies

words:

spasm
futile
insinuate
convulsive
illumination
undue
grip
recuperation
improvise
sedulously
aggravate
trifling
gratify
vivify

caprice
satiation
frantically
avenge
boredom
clatter
sustenance
appetite
grudge
absorbing
banish