Animals in the local zoo, Primates -- Part 1 Primates = monkeys + apes + lemurs. The word "lemur" comes from the Latin word “lemurs”, which means "ghosts". This name refers to many of the nocturnal (active at night) lemur species and their large eyes which make them look like ghosts. Lemurs are marvelous jumpers with ring tails. They can jump up to ten meters in one single bounce, which is about the same length as a bus. Lemurs live ONLY on the island of Madagascar and some smaller islands next to it. Monkeys = capuchins + baboons + macaques + … The Rhesus Macaque is THE monkey we are usually talking about (I mean in China). I dare say that the Monkey King is a Rhesus Macaque too. Rhesus Macaques are very social. They have a very intricate social structure and hierarchy which make the observation on them quite interesting. Another funky fact is that they can actually store a whole day’s worth in their cheeks which is really handy, because in the wild, if they’re searching for food in dangerous places, they don’t have to hang around for too long. Capuchin monkeys are native to Central and South America. These little guys are really smart, they select a few of the ripest fruits. After nipping off the tip and drinking the juice, they discard the rest of the fruit with the nut inside. When these discarded fruits are hardened and brittle (easily cracked), the capuchins gather them up. Then they will use tools to crack open nuts. What a cracking job! Isn’t it? Despite of being the largest kinds of monkey in size, baboons are actually friendly animals in most of time. They are omnivores (eat both plants and meat). Their diet includes grasses, roots, insects and other small animals, like lizards, small mammals, fishes and birds. Seems not fierce, do they? But don’t be cross with them. It is said that an angry baboon can kill a cheetah with bare hands.

Could you please list the most popular classic children’s games in the English world? I want to play some games with my son. As a non-native speaker, I am not very familiar with all these games, especially what players usually say. Please explain them in details. For example, when playing hide-and-seek, the player (“it”) will say “ready or not, here I come” after counting and attempt to find all other players. In “three little pigs”, the big bad wolf usually answer: “Then I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house in.” You know, sentences like that.

Can you help me to hear this and tell me what does this woman say? https://youtu.be/ad0s6s-cnow?t=24s Something like "you may have a courage to...". It is supposed to be a famous quote or something like that. This software, Encarta 96, was the one of most influential things in my life, which inspired me learning English and changed the course of my life. I tried to figure out what the other three clips (in the first 20 seconds) were. However, the last one still remains an "enigma" to me.

Can stars and AlphaGo called “life form”? I love astronomy and sometimes go out for stargazing. When I look at those stars, I am always wondering “are they living?” Well, stars do “die”. Then the new stars will be “born” from the ashes. If the new stars resemble to the old ones and they can evolve, then why can’t we literally call them a “life form”? But the problem is that it’s quite hard for us to really know about it, as that process would usually take millions even billions of years, which possibly if not probably outlives us all, the humanity. Imagine the bacteria living inside us, they are civilized, they developed science, philosophy, arts, even quantum physics (could be a little easier for them because of their sizes). But the bacteria scientists may never be aware that the whole space they live in is actually a living thing. I gather we might be like those bacteria more or less. AlphaGo makes me to rethink about what life is. Can we call it a “life form”? It can be duplicated, it can evolve. Most of people will laugh at that idea because it doesn’t have a “body”. But we always can make a robot body, maybe a male looking one, put AlphaGo into that body. If that happens, it could be a bit ambiguous either we agree or disagree that AlphaGo has life. However, we surely can copy AlphaGo out and destroy that body, put it into another body, let’s say a hottie. So the body looks quite like some kind of “cloth” in this case. My question is, can we simplify the definition of “life” to merely three words--spontaneously evolving information? Perspective is a very powerful thing. Perspective can change. If we change our perspectives, something amazing may happen. For example, if life can be considered “spontaneously evolving information”, languages can be deemed to be a “life form”. Then we can “borrow” some study methods from biology and apply them to linguistics. Linguists may draw some scientific predictions which are falsifiable. Such as, if the globalization and internet continue to develop, the diversity of languages would dramatically decrease (like you put all species into the same continent). We would witness the largest “linguicide” in the human history in the following decades. We may even calculate the estimated rates of language extinctions and take measures in advance in order to preserve the invaluable heritages given by our ancestors over hundreds of thousands generations.

Five Chinese characters “月”(moon) is a semi-circle with a dot in it. The moon has phases, so it explains why there is a semi-circle. The dot indicates that the moon glows. “雨” looks much like rains. The two lines on the top stand for the sky. “天” is a man with a square above his head. It means the space on the top. The original meaning of “厂” is actually the “cliff” as what it resembles. Then gradually it combined with another character "厰”", which represents an open and spacious building. "石"="厂"+"口", it stands for a square thing underneath the cliff. Yes, that's stone.

TEDtalks SETI Part 2 The speaker also mentioned the possibility, if not the probability of the existence of Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. Our sun is one of 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and there are more than 100 billion galaxies in the universe. It is quite common for a star to have planets. And some of these planets are not neither too small nor too big, not neither too close nor too far from their stars, which make them as inhabitable as our planet namely the Earth is. There could be more inhabitable planets in the universe than all the sands on the earth sum up. So I could say there is quite a great chance (maybe 99.99%?) that there are or were civilizations out there, in the deep space. Maybe some of them are also looking up at the night sky, at the same stars, from the opposite side, asking and answering similar questions as we do. Another interesting thing is that they are actually examining the past of those stars. Stars are so far away from us, the nearest star is 4.2 light years away, the nearest galaxy is 2.5 million light years away. The signal they get is just a snapshot about what they were a long time ago, maybe millions of years ago. Ultimately what determines the success or failure of SETI is the longevity of technologies. If technologies don’t last and persist, like a shooting star, it would be very hard to detect them. SETI tells us about some other stars’ past, but a detection of positive sign tells us it’s possible that a civilization could last for a very long time. After all, comparing to the age of the universe, we, the human beings are just like a new-born infant merely on his first breath in the world. We are not sure about the nature of ourselves and whether our infinite stupidity would lead to our own extinction. So the profound influence SETI could deliver us is to reveal a little bit about our future. This is why SETI is bizarrely called “the archaeology of the future”.

TEDtalks SETI Part 1 I’ve watched an episode of TED Talks. I use the word “episode” because I saw it on Netflix. And they put relevant TED talks together. The series I watched is called “TEDTalks : Space Trek”. The talk was given by an old lady. She spoke in an elegant way to explain the vast of the cosmos and what kind of project SETI is. In one word, SETI is all about one question—“Are we alone?” SETI is a project to search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. They used a gigantic radio telescope to gather signals of the electromagnetic waves emitted from the stars. They got the data and analyze it to find whether the signal is not normal but artificial. I still remember that I downloaded a computer program developed by them many years ago. It was called SETI@Home. I installed that program. It would retrieve a small piece of data, and then analyze it when your computer is idle. After the analysis was finished, it would return the result back to their server. By this program, they can utilize the idle time in millions of the volunteers’ computers to provide the powerful computing ability for handling the tremendous demanding of their data analysis. For now, they haven’t gotten any positive sign yet. But they only looked up a tiny part of the sky.

Chinese character "了" When we talk about "了", we'd better check out "厶" first. "厶" is not used any more. It stood for the baby with his/her head downwards which meant he/she was not born yet. After the baby was born, then what would you do? You would turn him/her upside down and embrace the baby with your arms. So initially, "了"("厶" upside down) meant the baby already born. When the baby is born, then the delivery is over, you've "finished" a very important and quite tired work, haven't you? I bet a mother would understand this character better. There are some other related characters which are all about human beings. "子"(boy) is a swaddled infant waving his hands. "大"(big) is a man standing upright with all his four limbs stretched. He is certainly of indomitable spirit and feeling something "big". "人"(people) looks exactly like a person who is working in the field and taking care of his crops.

Chinese character "is" "是"(is) is another one of the most frequently used characters in Chinese. It is made up of three blocks, "日"(sun), "又"(hand) and "止"(toe). Originally it means the exact day to go out on your foot and use your hands to plant crops. So it has the meaning of something correct (derived from "correct time"). "日" is a circle with a central dot. It's a circle because the sun is round. The dot is indicative, referring to the fact that the sun is shining. "又" meant "hand", actually, it's the right hand. Hand? Yes! Doesn't it resemble the hand, does it? But this meaning was lost already. I didn't get it about how did the current meaning come from. But after I found out that "又" was used in the ancient numbering system, it became clearer. It was a symbol placed between the tens digit and the unit digit. For example, "俘人十又六人(We had sixteen captives. It's an Oracle bone script in the Shang Dynasty)". It's quite natural people doing that. Because your hands are the most convenient tool for counting. I guess we will use octal number system if we were the octopus. So "又" got another meaning -- more, in addition. In the beginning, "止" meant "toe" and looked like three toes. But why it then became "stop"? Somebody says that you must have stopped marching if there is only one footprint on the ground. Well, I don't have a better explanation for this.