The building in the picture is Palazzo Braschi in Rome, the headquarters of the Fascist Party Federation (the local one, not the national Party headquarters). It was not always covered up like that; this set-up was displayed for the 1934 elections, in which Italians were called to vote either for or against the Fascist representatives list. The “SI SI…” lettering (meaning “Yes Yes…”) was propaganda for one of the two plebiscite elections held during the Fascist Regime, where electors didn’t vote for individual parties (there wasn’t any but the Fascist one), neither for single candidates, but just voted “Yes” or “No” to a single list of candidates presented by the Duce himself.
The voting procedure used two ballots and two envelopes; the yes ballot was in the colors of the Italian flag with fascist symbols, while the no ballot was a white sheet. The voter had to place the ballots in envelopes, put his chosen ballot in the ballot box and return the discarded one to the voting supervisors, de facto allowing them to check what each person had voted. The list put forward was ultimately approved by 99.84% of voters. The overwhelming majority provoked Benito Mussolini to dub the election the “second referendum of Fascism”.
When Mussolini promised a new world order for Italy, he set out to give Rome a Fascist façade. In Rome, the capital of the “fascist empire”, Mussolini’s grand scheme was to transform the city with propagandistic buildings and urban stages whose look and feel would broadcast his achievements and objectives. (This was exactly what the Roman emperors and the popes of the Catholic church had done for centuries, of course; without the inflated egos of so many past rulers). Architects in the 1920s and ‘30s took their cues from the forms of classical Roman buildings, but whereas the enormous structures of imperial Rome have ornate details and rounded edges that give them a certain Mediterranean warmth, fascist buildings were Teutonic blocks of unrelieved travertine, which made them cold and forbidding.
今天学习的是 Jeff Bezos 2010年在 Princeton University 做的毕业演讲：
Jeffrey Preston "Jeff" Bezos (born January 12, 1964) is an American technology entrepreneur and investor. He has played a role in the growth of e-commerce as the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, an online merchant of books and later of a wide variety of products and services, most recently video streaming. Amazon.com became the largest retailer on the World Wide Web and a model for Internet sales.
Bezos' other business interests include aerospace and newspapers. He is the founder and owner of the privately-funded aerospace developer and manufacturer Blue Origin, founded in 2000, with test flights to space beginning in 2015, and plans for commercial suborbital human spaceflight beginning in 2018. In 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post newspaper. A number of other business investments are managed through Bezos Expeditions.
As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially "Days of our Lives." My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we'd join the caravan. We'd hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather's car, and off we'd go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.
At that age, I'd take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I'd calculate our gas mileage -- figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I'd been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can't remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I'd come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, "At two minutes per puff, you've taken nine years off your life!"
I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. "Jeff, you're so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division." That's not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, "Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever."
What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices.
This is a group with many gifts. I'm sure one of your gifts is the gift of a smart and capable brain. I'm confident that's the case because admission is competitive and if there weren't some signs that you're clever, the dean of admission wouldn't have let you in.
Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans -- plodding as we are -- will astonish ourselves. We'll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom, we'll assemble tiny machines that will enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable news that we've synthesized life. In the coming years, we'll not only synthesize it, but we'll engineer it to specifications. I believe you'll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton -- all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization, we will have so many gifts, just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.
How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?
I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I'd never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles -- something that simply couldn't exist in the physical world -- was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I'd been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn't work since most startups don't, and I wasn't sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I'd been a garage inventor. I'd invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn't work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I'd always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.
I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, "That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn't already have a good job." That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn't think I'd regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I'm proud of that choice.
Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life -- the life you author from scratch on your own -- begins.
How will you use your gifts? What choices will you make?
Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?
Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?
Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?
Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?
Will you bluff it out when you're wrong, or will you apologize?
Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?
Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?
When it's tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?
Will you be a cynic, or will you be a builder?
Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?
I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck!
今天学习的 TED 是 Mary Roach 的《10 things you didn't know about orgasm》
Mary Roach is an American author, specializing in popular science and humor. Roach is noted for her curiosity and humor in addition to her research. Her many humor-laced articles in various publications over the decades include her monthly humor column, "My Planet", in Reader's Digest.
Alright. I'm going to show you a couple of images from a very diverting paper in The Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine. I'm going to go way out on a limb and say that it is the most diverting paper ever published in The Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine. The title is "Observations of In-Utero Masturbation."
Okay. Now on the left you can see the hand -- that's the big arrow -- and the penis on the right. The hand hovering. And over here we have, in the words of radiologist Israel Meisner, "The hand grasping the penis in a fashion resembling masturbation movements." Bear in mind this was an ultrasound, so it would have been moving images.
Orgasm is a reflex of the autonomic nervous system. Now, this is the part of the nervous system that deals with the things that we don't consciously control, like digestion, heart rate and sexual arousal. And the orgasm reflex can be triggered by a surprisingly broad range of input. Genital stimulation. Duh. But also, Kinsey interviewed a woman who could be brought to orgasm by having someone stroke her eyebrow. People with spinal cord injuries, like paraplegias, quadriplegias, will often develop a very, very sensitive area right above the level of their injury, wherever that is. There is such a thing as a knee orgasm in the literature.
I think the most curious one that I came across was a case report of a woman who had an orgasm every time she brushed her teeth.
Something in the complex sensory-motor action of brushing her teeth was triggering orgasm. And she went to a neurologist, who was fascinated. He checked to see if it was something in the toothpaste, but no -- it happened with any brand. They stimulated her gums with a toothpick, to see if that was doing it. No. It was the whole, you know, motion. And the amazing thing to me is that you would think this woman would have excellent oral hygiene.
Sadly -- this is what it said in the journal paper -- "She believed that she was possessed by demons and switched to mouthwash for her oral care." It's so sad.
When I was working on the book, I interviewed a woman who can think herself to orgasm. She was part of a study at Rutgers University. You've got to love that. Rutgers. So I interviewed her in Oakland, in a sushi restaurant. And I said, "So, could you do it right here?" And she said, "Yeah, but you know I'd rather finish my meal if you don't mind."
But afterwards, she was kind enough to demonstrate on a bench outside. It was remarkable. It took about one minute. And I said to her, "Are you just doing this all the time?"
She said, "No. Honestly, when I get home, I'm usually too tired."
She said that the last time she had done it was on the Disneyland tram.
The headquarters for orgasm, along the spinal nerve, is something called the sacral nerve root, which is back here. And if you trigger, if you stimulate with an electrode, the precise spot, you will trigger an orgasm. And it is a fact that you can trigger spinal reflexes in dead people -- a certain kind of dead person, a beating-heart cadaver. Now this is somebody who is brain-dead, legally dead, definitely checked out, but is being kept alive on a respirator, so that their organs will be oxygenated for transplantation. Now in one of these brain-dead people, if you trigger the right spot, you will see something every now and then. There is a reflex called the Lazarus reflex. And this is -- I'll demonstrate as best I can, not being dead. It's like this. You trigger the spot. The dead guy, or gal, goes... like that. Very unsettling for people working in pathology labs.
Now, if you can trigger the Lazarus reflex in a dead person, why not the orgasm reflex? I asked this question to a brain death expert, Stephanie Mann, who was foolish enough to return my emails.
I said, "So, could you conceivably trigger an orgasm in a dead person?" She said, "Yes, if the sacral nerve is being oxygenated, you conceivably could." Obviously it wouldn't be as much fun for the person. But it would be an orgasm -- nonetheless.
There is a researcher at the University of Alabama who does orgasm research. I said to her, "You should do an experiment. You know? You can get cadavers if you work at a university." I said, "You should actually do this." She said, "You get the human subjects review board approval for this one."
According to 1930s marriage manual author, Theodoor van De Velde, a slight seminal odor can be detected on the breath of a woman within about an hour after sexual intercourse. Theodoor van De Velde was something of a semen connoisseur.
This is a guy writing a book, "Ideal Marriage," you know. Very heavy hetero guy. But he wrote in this book, "Ideal Marriage" -- he said that he could differentiate between the semen of a young man, which he said had a fresh, exhilarating smell, and the semen of mature men, whose semen smelled, quote, "Remarkably like that of the flowers of the Spanish chestnut. Sometimes quite freshly floral, and then again sometimes extremely pungent."
Okay. In 1999, in the state of Israel, a man began hiccupping. And this was one of those cases that went on and on. He tried everything his friends suggested. Nothing seemed to help. Days went by. At a certain point, the man, still hiccupping, had sex with his wife. And lo and behold, the hiccups went away. He told his doctor, who published a case report in a Canadian medical journal under the title, "Sexual Intercourse as a Potential Treatment for Intractable Hiccups." I love this article because at a certain point they suggested that unattached hiccuppers could try masturbation.
I love that because there is like a whole demographic: unattached hiccuppers. Married, single, unattached hiccupper.
In the 1900s, early 1900s, a lot of gynecologists believed that when a woman has an orgasm, the contractions serve to suck the semen up through the cervix and sort of deliver it really quickly to the egg, thereby upping the odds of conception. It was called the "upsuck" theory.
If you go all the way back to Hippocrates, physicians believed that orgasm in women was not just helpful for conception, but necessary. Doctors back then were routinely telling men the importance of pleasuring their wives. Marriage-manual author and semen-sniffer Theodoor van De Velde -- has a line in his book. I loved this guy. I got a lot of mileage out of Theodoor van De Velde. He had this line in his book that supposedly comes from the Habsburg Monarchy, where there was an empress Maria Theresa, who was having trouble conceiving. And apparently the royal court physician said to her, "I am of the opinion that the vulva of your most sacred majesty be titillated for some time prior to intercourse."
It's apparently, I don't know, on the record somewhere.
Masters and Johnson: now we're moving forward to the 1950s. Masters and Johnson were upsuck skeptics, which is also really fun to say. They didn't buy it. And they decided, being Masters and Johnson, that they would get to the bottom of it. They brought women into the lab -- I think it was five women -- and outfitted them with cervical caps containing artificial semen. And in the artificial semen was a radio-opaque substance, such that it would show up on an X-ray. This is the 1950s. Anyway, these women sat in front of an X-ray device. And they masturbated. And Masters and Johnson looked to see if the semen was being sucked up. Did not find any evidence of upsuck. You may be wondering, "How do you make artificial semen?"
I have an answer for you. I have two answers. You can use flour and water, or cornstarch and water. I actually found three separate recipes in the literature.
My favorite being the one that says -- you know, they have the ingredients listed, and then in a recipe it will say, for example, "Yield: two dozen cupcakes." This one said, "Yield: one ejaculate."
There's another way that orgasm might boost fertility. This one involves men. Sperm that sit around in the body for a week or more start to develop abnormalities that make them less effective at head-banging their way into the egg. British sexologist Roy Levin has speculated that this is perhaps why men evolved to be such enthusiastic and frequent masturbators. He said, "If I keep tossing myself off I get fresh sperm being made." Which I thought was an interesting idea, theory. So now you have an evolutionary excuse.
Okay.
All righty. There is considerable evidence for upsuck in the animal kingdom -- pigs, for instance. In Denmark, the Danish National Committee for Pig Production found out that if you sexually stimulate a sow while you artificially inseminate her, you will see a six-percent increase in the farrowing rate, which is the number of piglets produced. So they came up with this five-point stimulation plan for the sows. There is posters they put in the barn, and they have a DVD. And I got a copy of this DVD.
This is my unveiling, because I am going to show you a clip.
So, okay. Now, here we go, la la la, off to work. It all looks very innocent. He's going to be doing things with his hands that the boar would use his snout, lacking hands. Okay.
This is it. The boar has a very odd courtship repertoire.
This is to mimic the weight of the boar.
You should know, the clitoris of the pig is inside the vagina. So this may be sort of titillating for her. Here we go.
And the happy result.
I love this video. There is a point in this video, towards the beginning, where they zoom in for a close up of his hand with his wedding ring, as if to say, "It's okay, it's just his job. He really does like women."
Okay. When I was in Denmark, my host was named Anne Marie. And I said, "So why don't you just stimulate the clitoris of the pig? Why don't you have the farmers do that? That's not one of your five steps." I have to read you what she said, because I love it. She said, "It was a big hurdle just to get farmers to touch underneath the vulva. So we thought, let's not mention the clitoris right now."
Shy but ambitious pig farmers, however, can purchase a -- this is true -- a sow vibrator, that hangs on the sperm feeder tube to vibrate. Because, as I mentioned, the clitoris is inside the vagina. So possibly, you know, a little more arousing than it looks. And I also said to her, "Now, these sows. I mean, you may have noticed there. The sow doesn't look to be in the throes of ecstasy." And she said, you can't make that conclusion, because animals don't register pain or pleasure on their faces in the same way that we do. Pigs, for example, are more like dogs. They use the upper half of the face; the ears are very expressive. So you're not really sure what's going on with the pig.
Primates, on the other hand, we use our mouths more. This is the ejaculation face of the stump-tailed macaque.
And, interestingly, this has been observed in female macaques, but only when mounting another female.
Masters and Johnson. In the 1950s, they decided, okay, we're going to figure out the entire human sexual response cycle, from arousal, all the way through orgasm, in men and women -- everything that happens in the human body. Okay, with women, a lot of this is happening inside. This did not stop Masters and Johnson. They developed an artificial coition machine. This is basically a penis camera on a motor. There is a phallus, clear acrylic phallus, with a camera and a light source, attached to a motor that is kind of going like this. And the woman would have sex with it. That is what they would do. Pretty amazing. Sadly, this device has been dismantled. This just kills me, not because I wanted to use it -- I wanted to see it.
One fine day, Alfred Kinsey decided to calculate the average distance traveled by ejaculated semen. This was not idle curiosity. Doctor Kinsey had heard -- and there was a theory going around at the time, this being the 1940s -- that the force with which semen is thrown against the cervix was a factor in fertility. Kinsey thought it was bunk, so he got to work. He got together in his lab 300 men, a measuring tape, and a movie camera.
And in fact, he found that in three quarters of the men the stuff just kind of slopped out. It wasn't spurted or thrown or ejected under great force. However, the record holder landed just shy of the eight-foot mark, which is impressive.
Yes. Exactly.
Sadly, he's anonymous. His name is not mentioned.
In his write-up of this experiment in his book, Kinsey wrote, "Two sheets were laid down to protect the oriental carpets."
Which is my second favorite line in the entire oeuvre of Alfred Kinsey. My favorite being, "Cheese crumbs spread before a pair of copulating rats will distract the female, but not the male."
Thank you very much.
Thanks!
