MENU

BILINGUAL BLOG – BLOG SONG NGỮ ANH VIỆT SHARE KNOWLEGE AND IMPROVE LANGUAGE

--------------------------- TÌM KIẾM TRÊN BLOG NÀY BẰNG GOOGLE SEARCH ----------------------------

TXT-TO-SPEECH – PHẦN MỀM ĐỌC VĂN BẢN

Click phải, chọn open link in New tab, chọn ngôn ngữ trên giao diện mới, dán văn bản vào và Click SAY – văn bản sẽ được đọc với các thứ tiếng theo hai giọng nam và nữ (chọn male/female)

- HOME - VỀ TRANG ĐẦU

CONN'S CURENT THERAPY 2016 - ANH-VIỆT

150 ECG - 150 ĐTĐ - HAMPTON - 4th ED.

VISUAL DIAGNOSIS IN THE NEWBORN

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

The advantages of pessimism -Lợi thế của thái độ bi quan


The advantages of pessimism

Incompatibility between our big aspirations and the reality of life is bound to disappoint unless we learn to be a bit more gloomy, says Alain de Botton.

Today I want to advance the unusual idea that we'd be a great deal more cheerful if we learnt to be a little more pessimistic.

And, from a completely secular point of view, I'd like to suggest that in the passages before they go on to promise us salvation, religions are rather good at being pessimistic. For example, Christianity has spent much of its history emphasising the darker side of earthly existence.

Yet even within this sombre tradition, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal stands out for the exceptionally merciless nature of his pessimism. In his book the Pensees, Pascal misses no opportunities to confront his readers with evidence of mankind's resolutely deviant, pitiful and unworthy nature.
DNA autoradiogram Scientific advances make us optimistic

In seductive classical French, he informs us that happiness is an illusion. "Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself," he says. Misery is the norm, he states: "If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it." And we have to face the desperate facts of our situation head on. "Man's greatness," he writes, "comes from knowing he is wretched."

Given the tone, it comes as something of a surprise to discover that reading Pascal is not at all the depressing experience one might have presumed. The work is consoling, heartwarming and even, at times, hilarious.

For those teetering on the verge of despair, there can paradoxically be no finer book to turn to than one which seeks to grind man's every last hope into the dust. The Pensees - far more than any saccharine volume touting inner beauty, positive thinking or the realisation of hidden potential - has the power to coax the suicidal off the ledge of a high parapet.

If Pascal's pessimism can effectively console us, it may be because we are usually cast into gloom not so much by negativity as by hope. It is hope - with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians and our planet - that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us.

Nurture and educate

The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces. Hence the relief, which can explode into bursts of laughter, when we finally come across an author generous enough to confirm that our very worst insights, far from being unique, are part of the common, inevitable reality of mankind.

Our dread that we might be the only ones to feel anxious, bored, jealous, perverse and narcissistic turns out to be gloriously unfounded, opening up unexpected opportunities for communion around our dark realities.

We should honour Pascal, and the long line of pessimistic writers to which he belongs, for doing us the incalculably great favour of publicly and elegantly rehearsing the facts of our sinful and pitiful state. This is not a stance with which the modern world betrays much sympathy, for one of its dominant characteristics and - in my opinion - its greatest flaw is its optimism.

Despite occasional moments of panic, most often connected to market crises, wars or pandemics, the secular contemporary world maintains an all but irrational devotion to a narrative of improvement, based on a quasi-messianic faith in the three great drivers of change - science, technology and commerce.

Material improvements since the mid-18th Century have been so remarkable and have so exponentially increased our comfort, safety, wealth and power, as to deal an almost fatal blow to our capacity to remain pessimistic - and therefore, crucially, to our ability to stay sane and content.

It has been impossible to hold on to a balanced assessment of what life is likely to provide for us when we have witnessed the cracking of the genetic code, the invention of the mobile phone, the opening of Western-style supermarkets in remote corners of China and the launch of the Hubble telescope.

Naivety and credulousness
Yet while it is undeniable that the scientific and economic trajectories of mankind have been pointed firmly in an upward direction for several centuries, you and I do not comprise mankind. None of us as individuals can dwell exclusively amidst the ground-breaking developments in genetics or telecommunications that lend our age its distinctive and buoyant prejudices.

We may derive some benefit from the availability of hot baths and computer chips, but our lives are no less subject to accident, frustrated ambition, heartbreak, jealousy, anxiety or death than were those of our medieval forebears. But at least our ancestors had the advantage of living in a religious era which never made the mistake of promising its population that happiness could ever make a permanent home for itself on this earth.

The secular are at this moment in history a great deal more optimistic than the religious - something of an irony given the frequency with which the religious have been derided by the non religious for their apparent naivety and credulousness. It is the secular whose longing for perfection has grown so intense as to lead them to imagine that paradise might be realised on this earth after just a few more years of financial growth and medical research.

With no evident awareness of the contradiction they may, in the same breath, gruffly dismiss a belief in angels while sincerely trusting that the combined powers of the IMF, the medical research establishment, Silicon Valley and democratic politics will together cure the ills of mankind.

The benefits of a philosophy of pessimism are to be seen in relation to love. Christianity and Judaism present marriage not as a union inspired and governed by subjective enthusiasm but rather, and more modestly, as a mechanism by which individuals can assume an adult position in society and thence, with the help of a close friend, undertake to nurture and educate the next generation under divine guidance.

Capacity for appreciation

These limited expectations tend to forestall the suspicion, so familiar to secular partners, that there might have been more intense, angelic or less fraught alternatives available elsewhere. Within the religious ideal friction, disputes and boredom are signs not of error, but of life proceeding according to plan.

These religions do recognise our desire to adore passionately. They know of our need to believe in others, to worship and serve them and to find in them a perfection which eludes us in ourselves. They simply insist that these objects of adoration should always be divine rather than human.

Therefore they assign us eternally youthful, attractive and virtuous deities to shepherd us through life while reminding us on a daily basis that human beings are comparatively humdrum and flawed creations worthy of forgiveness and patience, a detail which is apt to elude our notice in the heat of marital squabbling.

Why can't you be more perfect? This is the incensed question that lurks beneath a majority of secular arguments. In their effort to keep us from hurling our curdled dreams at one another, religions have the good sense to provide us with angels to worship and lovers to tolerate.

A pessimistic world view does not have to entail a life stripped of joy. Pessimists can have a far greater capacity for appreciation than their opposite numbers, for they never expect things to turn out well and so may be amazed by the modest successes which occasionally break out across their darkened horizons.

How to memorize new words - Làm sao nhớ từ mới



How can we easily memorize new words in a different language? Different people have different techniques for memorizing new words but there are some basic ways that we can make memorizing easier for us.

The most important part of learning new vocabulary is being able to remember it the first few times you need to, after that a new neural pathway is created in your brain and the link is already established. The first few times you use it though should be a little way apart. It is not as effective using it 3-4 times in 30 seconds as using it 3-4 times in 5 days.

This usually causes the problem; because there is so much information coming to us all the time, we don't retain everything, we only retain what stands out, what seems significant, and because the new word may not have triggered significance to us, (because it's a sound we are unfamiliar with and tends then to be thrown out with the rest of the noise) we don't remember it when we need to use it. This lowers our confidence in our ability, makes us reiterate that "learning languages is difficult" and our brain switches off to protect us from things that are difficult in case we fail at them which would make us feel even worse!

So how do we know what IS significant? Anything that makes us feel an emotion, anything that snaps us out of our normal autopilot filters and makes us take notice.
Try it yourself. What did you do last weekend? You will only be able to remember in detail the significant moments, the things that stand out, the things that made you feel some kind of emotion and that were different to the usual.
However we CAN use this to remember new vocabulary. By using the techniques in this video we can help glue the new word to something we already know with emotion. We can create that emotion by making the link unusual and adding sensory detail to make it clearer.

Then we will be able to overcome the biggest hurdle of new vocabulary, the first 3-4 times usage in context; once we have made these links memorable by gluing them together with emotion we can come back to them in one day/2 days/3 days and we can still remember them. If we can remember them when we need to use them in context, each time we use them in context gives us confidence and adds another layer of glue to the link until eventually we bypass the original image we had and just go from the word in our own language to the word in the foreign language, without even thinking about it.

Give it a try, remember, there is no right or wrong way to do this, only different degrees of effectiveness, and what applies to you, everybody has their own links that will work for them, but the more detail you add and the more unusual you make the image the easier it will be to remember, so get creative and enjoy!





Do you have trouble memorizing things? Have you invested an entire day in a seminar only to forget everything within a few weeks? How many times do you say, "I'm sorry I forgot your name?" Now you can learn a few ideas about how memorization works. Invest approximately 8 minutes and stop wasting time. Learn how to learn and retain important information. You will increase your credibility and have an easier time building rapport by remembering names and other pertinent facts about others.




This is a new method of learning and studying material. Research concludes that it is the most effective way of learning.

In my research I found that the average person remembers 40% of material they learn by listing words. This rises to 60% when you associate these words with mental images. But by making a quick story in your head you can double the results with 90% of the words. In fact, the more bizarre the story the better.

This method can be used by students for learning terms, quotes, events, dates. One candidate even used this to learn off entire essays before big exams with huge success.

This can be used to better your education, your career and your life.




Can watching TV make you die younger? - Xem TV nhiều chết sớm?


Can watching TV make you die younger?


Beware any headline in a newspaper or blog that starts with a question.

Generally the answer to the question is no, and is a means for the writer to grab the reader's attention and then proceed to irritate them. I will try not to by giving my conclusion straight off - no, watching TV will not make you die younger.

I pose the question because of a study that may well get some media attention. Published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine it suggests that compared to people who watch no TV, those who spend a lifetime average of watching six hours a day can expect to live nearly five years less.

The average Britain watches three hours TV a day so you might think you are in the clear. But according to the research from the University of Queensland, any TV watching may shorten your life.

The author of the research paper Dr Lennert Veerman, from the Centre for Burden of Disease and Cost Effectiveness, told me they had adjusted their research to exclude people who were physically active while watching TV - such as running on a treadmill or rowing.

As someone who works in television I told him I was worried I might be slowly killing off my viewers. I was even more worried by the paper's conclusions that "TV viewing may have adverse health consequences that rival those of lack of physical activity, obesity and smoking; every single hour of TV viewed may shorten life by as much as 22 min."
War and Peace

We all surely know that smoking is really very, very bad for us. But this research suggests that watching TV may be on a par. Indeed it even suggests that for those over 25, half an hour of TV viewing "may shorten life to a similar degree" as smoking a cigarette.

One obvious danger here is that smokers will say their habit is no worse than TV, so they might as well carry on.

So what about those people who don't watch any, or not very much TV? Presumably quite a few of them spend time reading books. Sitting reading is a sedentary occupation, and yet no-one is suggesting you should avoid "War and Peace" or the later, over-long Harry Potter novels.

I put this to Dr Veerman who agreed it may not be the TV viewing itself that was cutting life expectancy: "It is always possible that the effects are associated with lifestyle rather than the TV viewing itself" said Dr Veerman.
Overweight

Which means that people who watch a lot of TV tend to lead unhealthy, sedentary lifestyles. It's not the six hours of TV which is killing them, but the likelihood that they are not filling the rest of their waking hours with healthy physical activity. Those who watch huge amounts of TV are also probably more likely to have an unhealthy diet and be overweight.

Have you noticed how many umbrellas are used when it's raining? So umbrella use is associated with wet weather, but common sense tells us umbrellas don't cause rainfall. It's common sense of course but science and statistics can too easily be taken out of context and divorced from reality.

Earlier this year an American study found that more than two hours of TV viewing per day significantly increased the risk of type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and more than three hours of daily viewing increased the risk of premature death.
Health benefits

That paper made it clear that it was not watching TV for long periods that was unhealthy, but it reflected an unhealthy lifestyle.

Dr Veerman said his latest study is meant to have a positive message, that every step counts. In other words, small alterations in lifestyle - like watching less TV and doing something active - can bring about significant health benefits.

That point is underlined in another new study on physical activity, from researchers in Taiwan. In the Lancet online, they suggest that 15 minutes of physical activity per day can reduce a person's risk of death by 14% and increase life expectancy by three years compared with inactive people.

The researchers analysed the medical screening results of more than 400,000 Taiwanese people with an average follow-up of eight years. They found that every additional 15 minutes of daily exercise beyond 15 minutes a day further reduced mortality by 4%.

Last month the Department of Health updated its advice on weekly physical activity. It recommends 150 minutes a week, and "reducing and minimising periods of sedentary behaviour". Even if you don't manage 150 minutes exercise a week but do around 90 minutes, you could still get significant benefits.

The Taiwanese and the Australian research both point in the same direction - that physical activity is good for you and even small changes in lifestyle could help us lead longer and healthier lives.

I won't be giving up television, or long novels, but I might try to snack less and walk more.