pole dance

钢管舞，以前不知道怎么称呼地铁里面那个钢管，现在知道了，叫 pole

And the Mountains Echoed

Khaled Hosseini 的第三本小说

And the Mountains Echoed is the third novel by Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini. Published in 2013 by Riverhead Books, it deviates from Hosseini's style in his first two works through his choice to avoid focusing on any one character. Rather, the book is written similarly to a collection of short stories, with each of the nine chapters being told from the perspective of a different character. The book's foundation is built on the relationship between ten-year-old Abdullah and his three-year-old sister Pari and their father's decision to sell her to a childless couple in Kabul, an event that ties the various narratives together.

As it was Hosseini's first novel to be published in six years, And the Mountains Echoed was reportedly in high demand. It received favorable pre-publication reviews and was anticipated as another strong success, reaching the top 10 on Amazon.com before its release and later becoming a bestseller. Five months after the publication of And the Mountains Echoed, it was reported that three million copies had been sold.

idiom

成语

探讨了英语和中文的阅读速度问题，观点是英文的阅读速度是相对较慢的，也不能做到一目十行

The speeds of reading Chinese and reading English are not comparable for me. Considering myself a fast reader of three languages including English, I can read a long paragraph written in Chinese at a single glance, and get almost all the essential meaning. Also, I could scan and locate the information I need in a hell long article almost instantly, provided it must be written in Chinese or Japanese. I am trying to find a way that can make me achieve this in reading English articles, especially huge amount of academic content. I can now apply some rapid reading tricks to reading English stuff, but still cannot read a whole page at once, which seems to be natural when I am reading Chinese content.

The most important issue that prevents fast reading should be Sub-vocalization, not information processing limit, for educated people. Kanji, if you have been enough familiar and sensitive to them, would result in reading them at the speed of light. Kanji as a logographic writing system is essential for extreme fast, non-linear reading, which is mentioned in an idiom “一目十行” - "one glance, ten lines".

Some evidence is that: It is much slower for reading if Japanese sentences are written using only alphabet no matter kana or romaji. Kanji are embedded into Japanese language for nouns and stems of adjectives and verbs mostly, while the phonetic symbols called Kanamoji (Hiragana and Katakana) are used for particles, word endings, grammar words, western words, etc.

Interestingly, although Chinese uses less text than Japanese, I don’t find reading Chinese is faster than Japanese, the speeds are roughly the same. Japanese has predictable grammar structure, while Chinese grammar is similar to English which is unpredictable. The mixture of Kanji and Kana is a way of avoiding monotony and stressing the key words.

However, although english like all alphabetical languages is slower for reading, English remains the dominant language especially in scientific and technical areas and structured English is crucial for programming. Almost all useful and valuable articles over the internet are written in English.

We learn English not because it is a very efficient language, in fact all today's languages are not good enough too, but we like the western culture, advanced technologies, etc. and today's English is sufficient and easy to learn for today's communication.

Why can Chinese characters or Kanji be read at super-fast speed?

You can read English rather fast like native people do, by seeing the words as a whole shape, and English words get different lengths to help distinguish them, I also read English in this way and without any sub-vocalization.But interesting enough that it seems not possible to instantly read a whole page written in English, also you cannot immediately locate the word or phrase you need in a long article, without using search tools of course.

On the other hand, Chinese characters are all the same size and very complex. But I can at a glance read a whole page of Chinese articles, or locate a Kanji or Kanji phrase immediately, barely using eyes. The magic of Kanji is that they are all unique to each other. This is something like, you can quickly pick your portrait in a group of different people’s portraits. The process of distinguishing Kanji is much faster than that, because they are logographic, simpler than pictures, but still very unique to each other in their shapes.

也有人认为英文的阅读速度并不慢：

I, like many native English speakers, speed read, which meanings reading at a much faster pace than vocalization. Even though English words may take up huge amounts of space, you can quickly glance thorough sentences and paragraphs and your mind automatically skips unnecessary words. I read 2 page news articles in 60 seconds and hundred page books in an hour or two - this isn’t any slower than a Chinese reader.

ascenders and descenders

字母的上部分和下部分出头的地方

Monash University

墨尔本的一所大学

Monash University is an Australian public research university based in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1958, it is the second oldest university in the State of Victoria. Monash is a member of Australia's Group of Eight, a coalition of Australia's eight leading research Universities, a member of the ASAIHL, and is the only Australian member of the influential M8 Alliance of Academic Health Centers, Universities and National Academies. Monash is one of two Australian universities to be ranked in the École des Mines de Paris (Mines ParisTech) ranking on the basis of the number of alumni listed among CEOs in the 500 largest worldwide companies. Monash is in the top 20% in teaching, top 10% in international outlook, top 20% in industry income and top 10% in research in the world in 2016

FLOPS

Google 的 TPU 阵列可以达到 11.5P Flops 的算力

In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases it is a more accurate measure than measuring instructions per second.

Vega

织女星

Vega, also designated Alpha Lyrae (α Lyrae, abbreviated Alpha Lyr, α Lyr), is the brightest star in the constellation of Lyra, the fifth-brightest star in the night sky and the second-brightest star in the northern celestial hemisphere, after Arcturus. It is relatively close at only 25 light-years from the Sun, and, together with Arcturus and Sirius, one of the most luminous stars in the Sun's neighborhood.

Great Filter

大过滤器理论

The Great Filter, in the context of the Fermi paradox, is whatever prevents "dead matter" from giving rise, in time, to "expanding lasting life". The concept originates in Robin Hanson's argument that the failure to find any extraterrestrial civilizations in the observable universe implies the possibility something is wrong with one or more of the arguments from various scientific disciplines that the appearance of advanced intelligent life is probable; this observation is conceptualized in terms of a "Great Filter" which acts to reduce the great number of sites where intelligent life might arise to the tiny number of intelligent species with advanced civilizations actually observed (currently just one: human). This probability threshold, which could lie behind us (in our past) or in front of us (in our future), might work as a barrier to the evolution of intelligent life, or as a high probability of self-destruction.[1][4] The main counter-intuitive conclusion of this observation is that the easier it was for life to evolve to our stage, the bleaker our future chances probably are.

The idea was first proposed in an online essay titled "The Great Filter - Are We Almost Past It?", written by economist Robin Hanson. The first version was written in August 1996 and the article was last updated on September 15, 1998. Since that time, Hanson's formulation has received recognition in several published sources discussing the Fermi paradox and its implications.

Kardashev scale

一种文明的标度方式

The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement, based on the amount of energy a civilization is able to use for communication. The scale has three designated categories:

• A Type I civilization—also called planetary civilization—can use and store energy which reaches its planet from the parent star.
• A Type II civilization can harness the total energy of its planet's parent star (the most popular hypothetical concept being the Dyson sphere—a device which would encompass the entire star and transfer its energy to the planet(s)).
• A Type III civilization can control energy on the scale of its entire host galaxy.

Dyson sphere

戴森球，一种把恒星包裹起来获取能源的假象装置

A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that completely encompasses a star and captures most or all of its power output. The concept was first described by Olaf Stapledon in his science fiction novel Star Maker (1937), and later popularized by Freeman Dyson in his 1960 paper "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation". Dyson speculated that such structures would be the logical consequence of the escalating energy needs of a technological civilization and would be a necessity for its long-term survival. He proposed that searching for such structures could lead to the detection of advanced, intelligent extraterrestrial life. Different types of Dyson spheres and their energy-harvesting ability would correspond to levels of technological advancement on the Kardashev scale.

Milky Way galaxy

银河系

The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains our Solar System. The descriptive "milky" is derived from the appearance from Earth of the galaxy – a band of light seen in the night sky formed from stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. The term "Milky Way" is a translation of the Latin via lactea, from the Greek γαλαξίας κύκλος (galaxías kýklos, "milky circle"). From Earth, the Milky Way appears as a band because its disk-shaped structure is viewed from within. Galileo Galilei first resolved the band of light into individual stars with his telescope in 1610. Until the early 1920s, most astronomers thought that the Milky Way contained all the stars in the Universe. Following the 1920 Great Debate between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, observations by Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies.

Andromeda Galaxy

仙女座星系，离银河系最近的河外星系

The Andromeda Galaxy (/ænˈdrɒmᵻdə/), also known as Messier 31, M31, or NGC 224, is a spiral galaxy approximately 780 kiloparsecs (2.5 million light-years) from Earth. It is the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way and was often referred to as the Great Andromeda Nebula in older texts. It received its name from the area of the sky in which it appears, the constellation of Andromeda, which was named after the mythological princess Andromeda.

Proxima Centauri

比邻星

Proxima Centauri (from Latin, meaning 'nearest [star] of Centaurus') or Alpha Centauri C is a red dwarf, a small low-mass star, about 4.25 light-years from the Sun in the constellation of Centaurus. It was discovered in 1915 by the Scottish astronomer Robert Innes, the Director of the Union Observatory in South Africa, and is the nearest-known star to the Sun. With an apparent magnitude of 11.05, it is too faint to be seen with the naked eye.

Alma Mater

校歌

Alma mater (Latin: alma "nourishing/kind", mater "mother"; pl. [rarely used] almae matres) is an allegorical Latin phrase for a university or college. In modern usage, it is a school or university which an individual has attended, or a song or hymn associated with a school. The phrase is variously translated as "nourishing mother", "nursing mother", or "fostering mother", suggesting that a school provides intellectual nourishment to its students. Fine arts will often depict educational institutions using a robed woman as a visual metaphor.

This expression sometimes refers to the institution's official song, as in I never did learn the words to my college's alma mater. The term is Latin for “kind mother.”