2015年12月17日 星期四
week5 - Water on Mars: Exploration & Evidence ( NASA：證實火星有流動的液態鹽水 )
Water on Mars: Exploration & Evidence
Liquid water may still flow on Mars, but that
doesn't mean it's easy to spot. The search for water on the Red Planet has
taken more than 15 years to turn up definitive signs that liquid flows on the
surface today. In the past, however, rivers and oceans may have covered the
land. Where did all of the liquid water go? Why? How much of it still remains?
Observations of the Red Planet indicate that
rivers and oceans may have been prominent features in its early history.
Billions of years ago, Mars was a warm and wet world that could have supported
microbial life in some regions. But the planet is smaller than Earth, with less
gravity and a thinner atmosphere. Over time, as liquid water evaporated, more
and more of it escaped into space, allowing less to fall back to the surface of
the planet.
Where is the water today?
Liquid water appears to flow from some steep,
relatively warm slopes on the Martian surface. First identified in 2011, features
known as recurring slope lineae (RSL) were confirmed to be signs of salty water
running on the surface of the planet today. The dark streaks appear seasonally
on Martian slopes were found in images taken by the High Resolution Imaging
Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)
Spectral analysis of RSL lead scientists to conclude they are caused by salty
liquid water.
"The detection of hydrated salts on these
slopes means that water plays a vital role in the formation of these
streaks," the study's lead author, Lujendra Ojha, of the Georgia Institute
of Technology in
Vast deposits of water appear to be trapped
within the ice caps at the north and south poles of the planet. Each summer, as
temperatures increase, the caps shrink slightly as their contents skip straight
from solid to gas form, but in the winter, cooler temperatures cause them to
grow to latitudes as low as 45 degrees, or halfway to the equator. The caps are
an average of 2 miles (3 kilometers) thick and, if completely melted, could
cover the Martian surface with about 18 feet (5.6 meters) of water.
Frozen water also lies beneath the surface.
Scientists discovered a slab of ice as large as
The European Space Agency's Mars Express
spacecraft captured images of sheets of ice in the cooler, shadowed bottoms of
craters, which suggests that liquid water can pool under appropriate
conditions. Other craters identified by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show
similar pooling.
Evidence for water on Mars first came to light
in 2000, with the appearance of gullies that suggested a liquid origin. Their
formation has been hotly debated over the ensuing years.
2015年11月12日 星期四
Week 3 - Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. ( 賈伯斯在史丹佛大學畢業典禮上的演說 )
I
am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest
universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this
is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell
you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The
first story is about connecting the dots.
I
dropped out of Reed
College
It
started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college
graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very
strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all
set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I
popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So
my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night
asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said:
"Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had
never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high
school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few
months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And
17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was
almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings
were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the
value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how
college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the
money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and
trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but
looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped
out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin
dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It
wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in
friends' rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with,
and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good
meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled
into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later
on. Let me give you one example:
None
of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years
later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to
me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with
beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in
college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally
spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no
personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have
never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not
have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to
connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very
clear looking backward 10 years later.
Again,
you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking
backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your
future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma,
whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the
difference in my life.
My
second story is about love and loss.
I
was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple
in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had
grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over
4,000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a
year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get
fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I
thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or
so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and
eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with
him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my
entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I
really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the
previous generation of entrepreneurs down — that I had dropped the baton as it
was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize
for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about
running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I
still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one
bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start
over.
I
didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the
best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being
successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure
about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my
life.
During
the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named
Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar
went on to create the world's first computer animated feature film, Toy Story,
and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable
turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we
developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene
and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm
pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple.
It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes
life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that
the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to
find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be
truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do
great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking.
Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.
And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years
roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My
third story is about death.
When
I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day
as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made
an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in
the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of
my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the
answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to
change something.
Remembering
that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help
me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external
expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things
just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap
of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no
reason not to follow your heart.
About
a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a
tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told
me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I
should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me
to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to
die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the
next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure
everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your
family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I
lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where
they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my
intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I
was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the
cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be
a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the
surgery and I'm fine now.
This
was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get
for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with
a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual
concept:
No
one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get
there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped
it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best
invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way
for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you
will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but
it is quite true.
Your
time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped
by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't
let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most
important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow
already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When
I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog,
which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named
Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo
Park
Stewart
and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when
it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I
was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an
early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if
you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay
Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry.
Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you
graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay
Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank
you all very much.
Vocabulary
1. dropped out
休學
2. adoption
收養
3. working-class
工薪階層
4. hand calligraphed 手寫體
5. karma 因果報應
6. garage
車庫
7. current renaissance 復興
8. diagnosed
確診
9. endoscope
內視鏡
10.
pancreatic cancer 胰臟癌
來源
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
推薦延伸閱讀
http://mrjamie.cc/2011/09/16 /stay-hungry-stay-foolish/
2015年11月5日 星期四
Week 2 - Aung San Suu Kyi ( 翁山蘇姬 )
In Long-Overdue Speech, Dissident Says Nobel Opened Her Heart
OSLO — When she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991,
while under house arrest in Myanmar, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi said
Saturday, she realized that the Burmese “were not going to be forgotten.”
When the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded her the prize, she
said in her Nobel lecture here on
Saturday, 21 years later, it was recognition that “the oppressed and the
isolated in Burma
She said the prize “had made me real once again; it had drawn
me back into the wider human community,” and it had given the oppressed people
of Burma , now Myanmar
It was a remarkable moment for the slight Ms. Aung San Suu
Kyi, who turns 67 next week and is now a Member of Parliament and the leader of
Myanmar
The audience in Oslo’s City Hall, which included the
Norwegian royal family, listened raptly, applauding often, standing to clap
when Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi entered the hall and when she finished her speech,
which was at the same time modest, personal and touching, an appeal to find
practical ways to reduce the inextinguishable suffering of the world.
“Suffering degrades, embitters and enrages,” she said. “War is not the only
arena where peace is done to death.”
Vocabulary4. conscience - 良心
5. fatigue - 疲勞
8. arena - 競技場
Vocabulary
1. Norwegian - 挪威
2. oppressed - 壓迫
3. Burma - 緬甸
4. conscience - 良心
5. fatigue - 疲勞
6. lavender - 薰衣草
7.was assassinated - 被暗殺
8. arena - 競技場
2015年10月29日 星期四
Week 1 - Rohingya refugee ( 緬甸難民 )
Who are the Rohingya?
The Rohingya are a distinct Muslim ethnic group in Burma's Rakhine province, although many also live in neighboring Bangladesh.
Forced to live in apartheid-like conditions, Burma's Rohingya have been effectively stateless since the passing of the country's 1982 citizenship law. In fact the Burmese government refuses to recognise the Rohingya as an ethnic group, instead insisting they are Bengali economic migrants. In Febuary this year it declared that Rohingya "is terminology which has never been included among over 100 national races of Myanmar (Burma)", the New Statesmanreports.
What's happening at the moment?
Boats filled with Rohingya refugees and a number of economic migrants from Bangladesh are attempting to escape Burma via the waters of the Malacca Strait and the Andaman Sea. These migrants have been collectively dubbed 'boat people' by the international media.
Why are they fleeing?
After years of persecution in Burma, tensions reached a critical level in 2012 following the gang rape of a Buddhist woman. Violent clashes resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Rohingya and left a further 140,000 homeless; many are now trapped in internal displacement camps. Since the violence erupted, the UN predicts that 100,000 Rohingya have fled Burma by sea. Additionally, the International Organisation for Migration believes there are currently 8,000 Rohingya stranded at sea.
What's attracting the global attention now?
Recently, several boats packed with hundreds of desperate migrants have been caught up in a game of international ping-pong between South East Asian countries including Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.
Essentially the Rohingya refugees – joined by a number of Bangladeshi migrants – are being passed between countries that don't want them. The UN has called on nearby Malaysia and Indonesia to respect international law and offer help to those stranded at sea, but South East Asian countries have been using reports of the presence of economic migrants as an excuse to turn the so-called 'boat people' away. On Wednesday the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia said they would no longer turn away migrant boats.
In one incident last week, a boat containing some 300 migrants was left stranded off the coast of Thailand after its engine broke down. Repaired by the Thai navy, the boat continued on its journey towards Malaysia and Indonesia. While the Thai navy and ministry of defence insist that offers of refuge were made to the migrants, other reports claim they were intimidated away from the shore. The International Business Times reports that the boat has vanished after moving on from Thai waters.
How has the global community responded?
The international response has been mixed and confused, with blame and responsibility for action being passed from one group to another.
The response from largely Islamic African nations has been the loudest. On Wednesday, the impoverished West African nation of Gambia offered to resettle all the Rohingya in refugee camps, The Guardian reports. Even Al-Shabaab – the al-Qaeda-affiliated Somali terror group – has called upon the mostly Islamic nations of Indonesia and Malaysia to welcome the fleeing Rohingya and save them from "the savage Buddhists".
According to the Daily Telegraph, the group has also demanded that local Muslims "Mobilise men, money and resources to defend the honour of the persecuted Muslims and repel the savage attacks of the polytheists".
In the western, the US has pledged to help resettle the Rohingya, and criticised neighbouring countries for not doing enough to help. By contrast, Australian prime minister Tony Abbott said his country would do "absolutely nothing" that might encourage people to get on a boat, says The Guardian.
One notable absence is the voice of Burma's opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. The Nobel peace prize has remained largely silent on the Rohingya crisis.
———————————————————————————
- who - Rohingya refugees
- where - via the waters of the Malacca Strait and the Andaman Sea.
- when - May 21, 2015
- what - Forced to live in apartheid-like conditions, Burma's Rohingya have been effectively stateless since the passing of the country's 1982 citizenship law.
- why - Since the violence erupted, the UN predicts that 100,000 Rohingya have fled Burma by sea.
- how - The international response has been mixed and confused, with blame and responsibility for action being passed from one group to another.
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Vocabulary
Rohingya羅興亞人
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