переводHappiness Is Only Real When Shared?
My Russian wife told me, «The hand that pours the wine can not change». Is this a real thing, or was she just too lazy to pour?
There are many alcoholic traditions in Russia. And one of them is «the hand that pours the wine can not change». Why is that? I think, even Russians couldn’t tell you. Some traditions are so old, that you use them, but don’t know the origin of them. If you ask a Russian about it, one can say to you that changing hand can lead to a quarrel between drinking people, others can say to you the alcohol may be changed in its taste, and some people will say to you it is a very funny tradition in drinking culture and they use it only for fun. In short, using this tradition leads to a luck.
Why is Usain Bolt so incredibly fast?
There’s certainly no one single factor. Culturally, athletics is as popular in Jamaica as football is in Europe, and competing in the Inter-Secondary School Boys and Girls Championships – or ‘Champs’ – which attracts 35,000 fans is great practice for sprinting under pressure. Because of that, the standard in track and field is very high in Jamaica and the rewards are great: an athlete can earn a US college scholarship.
Physically, Bolt is gifted. His height hampers him at the start because it takes him longer to get out of the blocks, but once he’s up, his long strides come into play. He takes fewer steps that his competitors. He’s also one of two sprinters in history – the other being US 100m athlete, Tyson Gay – who are still accelerating at the 70m mark. Most sprinters begin to slow at 60m. That strength comes from his teenage training when he competed in the 200m and 400m. The longer races made him physically robust and gave him speed endurance, a factor that creates the optical illusion that Bolt is speeding up at the very end of a race when his rivals are actually slowing down at a quicker rate.
Why do people move to the right, politically, as they get older?
There is most certainly a general drift towards being conservative with a small «c» as a person gets older, hence valuing tradition, continuity and stability more than change, revolution and innovation. I would point to a number of possible drivers of this. Firstly, as a person ages, they become more personally invested in the status quo, and hence with preserving it. Secondly, there is less life left with increasing age, so the future becomes less interesting than the past, and with more attention focused on the past there is more value attached to preserving it. The ‘overthrow the evil system’ narrative that is endemic to hard left ideology is thus typically far less attractive to older people who are quite attached to how things are, and enjoy the stability and safety that it brings them. Finally, cognitive flexibility decreases with age, and with that I believe that there is an increasing preference for political views and values that are clear-cut, proven and lacking ambiguity. Conservatism and conservative values bring just that.
Have humans stopped evolving?
The issue is, we’ve taken control of our environment like no species ever has. We can control our temperature, our food, we can even delay whether we get pregnant or not. We live in the Arctic, the deserts, high altitudes. We manage to cope because we can think our way around things. We can adapt to environments that would normally kill any other species.
All this changes the fundamental process by which we evolve, as we are taking away some of the selective pressures that we would traditionally have. But I believe it hasn’t stopped us evolving. However, it’s at a much slower rate than we ever have before.
We are seeing some signs of change but they’re contested quite a lot, as separating evolutionary change from environmental change is really difficult. Everything after your conception is affected by nature. From the moment you are two or three cells big, the environment has an impact.
For example, we’re taller now than two generations ago. There is tentative evidence that says people in the west of Europe are inheritably getting taller than they were even just a few generations ago. That is supplemented by a massively improved diet, better healthcare and stuff like that. So it’s hard to definitively say it’s an evolutionary change.
Another one – our jaws are getting smaller. If you look at skulls from western Europe from pre-Industrial Revolution to now, we’ve gone from these beautiful occluding teeth, where they fit together perfectly at the front, to a maladaptation where most people have an overbite. It’s partly an environmental thing, where our diet is more processed, but there’s possibly a genetic link, an inheritable thing. We can’t definitively say this is 100% us evolving, but we can’t definitively say that it’s purely environmental.
However, something as fundamental as whether or not we needed glasses would have influenced whether we lived or died a million years ago, or even as recently as 200,000 years ago. If we look at our nearest ancestors, Neanderthals, then going further back to Homo Erectus and Australopithecines about 2.5m years ago, they were preyed upon by eagles and other predatory animals all the time. We know they could only live in certain areas. They couldn’t cope with certain climatic conditions, so even in our recent human history there have been huge selective pressures. Something like short-sightedness would probably have led to our downfall. If you can’t see a predator walking towards you, or you can’t see if that tribal clan is friend or foe, you’ll be dead very quickly. Whereas now, we just stick a pair of glasses on – we are taking some of these selective pressures away from what we would traditionally have.
About two million years ago, a fully-grown human ancestor would have been about 1.3 metres tall — that’s about the height of a seven or eight-year-old child. It’s only when we got to Homo Erectus and their predecessors that we’re getting to the 1.7metre mark. It’s really recently, about 1.5million years ago, that we got to an appreciable size, but before that, we weren’t very much bigger than chimps.
We’ve got this lovely evolutionary history that we can see right across the body in our recent ancestors. The big toe – the hallux – in Australopithecines and the earlier hominids was pushed to the side, as in chimps and gorillas. It was a grasping tool. But we don’t need that, so our big toe migrated forward to the position it’s in now with the other toes, which gives us more stability. It results in the arch of your foot – that’s there because the toe migrated. If you look at any other primate, they’re really flat-footed. But being flat-footed was detrimental for a biped who needed to walk long distances, as our ancestors did. Even something as fundamentally small as the position of your big toe had massive repercussions for the rest of our evolutionary trajectory.
These selective pressures aren’t massive now. We’ve got to the point where we are specialist generalists. We’re not like the panda that can only eat one diet, or the polar bear which can only live in very few climates, or even other primates like aye-ayes with their very strange fingers and eyes. We can live anywhere.
We’ve now got the evolutionary tool kit we need. All the equipment is there. Anything evolutionary we do now will be refining and honing it. So I think the evolution we’re going to see will be on a micro scale, with the gut flora, the symbiotic stuff that we have. We’ll probably change the relationship with things we have within us, the parasites and so on. It’s unlikely that it will be something like growing an extra long index finger to tap your phone with.
Ben Garrod presented BBC4’s Secrets Of Bones.
Перевод happiness only real when shared
Посмотрели Into the Wild (официальный русский перевод — «В диких условиях»). Фильм однозначно рекомендуется к просмотру, особо тем из моих друзей, кто часто находит себя в дороге. Фильм тяжелый. Длинный. Заставляет много думать, особенно если немного знать реальную историю главного героя (американский студент-идеалист Кристофер МакКэндлесс, в 24 года решил порвать с «миром потреблятства», сжег все деньги и кредитные карты, перечислил все накопления в благотворительный фонд, долго путешествовал стопом. Стопом же добрался до Аляски и ушел в леса, вдохновленный творениями Джека Лондона, Льва Толстого, Генри Торо и т.п. С собой у него было несколько кг риса, винтовка, справочник съедобных растений и записная книжка. Через 4 месяца Кристофер был найден в 400 (. ) метрах от действующей переправы. Очевидно, умер от истощения, не смог перейти бурную реку, чтобы выбраться ближе к дороге. Компасс и карту не взял с собой принципиально). Понятно, что погибший чудак-идеалист (эгоист? романтик? глупец? герой?) и персонаж фильма (и книги) — люди разные. Но последней записью реального МакКэндлесса было все-таки совершенно киношное «I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!». А главной (хотя, казалось бы, чересчур очевидной) фразой фильма для меня стала «Happiness is only real when shared». Очень просто.
Вот реальное фото Кристофера за несколько дней (недель?) до смерти (была на пленке в его фотоаппарате). Он устроил в этом брошенном автобусе подобие жилища. Выглядит счастливым 🙂
Те, кто смотрел «Сумерки» (есть среди моих френдов такие сумасшедшие?), узнают чУднУю Кристен Стюарт.
Обещанная цитата:
«. the joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.»
-chris mccandless AKA alexander supertramp, into the wild
Года два назад один очень хороший и мудрый человек сказал мне, что счастье — это когда ты можешь радоваться _однообразию_. С тех пор учусь ценить то, что есть. Но и горизонт стараемся не забывать 🙂
10 цитат на Английском. Развиваем эрудицию
Всем нам иногда сложно оставаться позитивными, ведь жизнь — сложная штука. Эти 10 цитат на английском помогут вам увидеть жизнь с лучшей стороны, открыть потрясающие возможности и улучшить своё настроение!
1. «Success is the child of audacity». (Benjamin Disraeli)
«Успех — дитя смелости». (Бенджамин Дизраэли)
2. «We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light». (Plato)
«Можно с лёгкостью простить ребёнка, который боится темноты. Настоящая трагедия жизни — когда взрослые люди боятся света». (Платон)
3. «It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change». (Charles Darwin)
«Выживает не самый сильный и не самый умный, а тот, кто лучше всех приспосабливается к изменениям». (Чарльз Дарвин)
4. «I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions». (Stephen Covey)
Я не продукт моих обстоятельств. Я продукт моих решений. (Стивен Кови)
5. «You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough». (Mae West)
«Мы живём один раз, но если правильно распорядиться жизнью, то и одного раза достаточно». (Мэй Уэст)
6. «The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why». (Mark Twain)
Два самых важных дня в вашей жизни: день, когда вы родились, и день когда поняли зачем. (Марк Твен)
7. «Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened». (Dr. Seuss)
«Не плачь, потому что это закончилось, улыбнись, потому что это было». (Доктор Сьюз)
8. «There are no shortcuts to any place worth going». (Helen Keller)
«К достойной цели нет коротких путей». (Хелен Келлер)
9. «Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm». (Winston Churchill)
«Успех — это умение двигаться от неудачи к неудаче, не теряя энтузиазма». (Уинстон Черчилль)
10. «Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language». (H. Jackson Brown, Jr.)
«Никогда не смейтесь над человеком, который говорит на ломаном английском. Это значит, что он знает и другой язык». (Х. Джексон Браун — младший)
Следите за новостями, подписывайтесь на канал и изучайте английский язык с удовольствием!