### Science Fiction Evolution: A Comprehensive Report

#### Introduction
Science fiction (SF) is a genre that has evolved significantly since its inception, reflecting changes in society, technology, and cultural perspectives.

This report aims to provide an understanding of how the genre has transformed from its early roots with authors like H.

G.

Wells to contemporary voices, including those from underrepresented demographics.

#### Early Influences and Development
The genre of science fiction began to take shape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Pioneering authors such as Jules Verne and H.

G.

Wells laid the groundwork for what would become a rich and diverse literary field.

Wells, in particular, is often credited with establishing many of the themes that would come to define science fiction, including time travel, alien invasion, and advanced technology.

His works, such as "The Time Machine" (1895) and "The War of the Worlds" (1898), explored the implications

### Science Fiction Evolution: A Comprehensive Report

#### Introduction
Science fiction (SF) is a genre that has evolved significantly since its inception, reflecting changes in society, technology, and cultural perspectives.

Title:

Content: Space Species: In the experiment of writing, “space ” is a doubt.
What we want you to know is
For Perec and this book, “writing ” means not simply words, nor mere words, but the use of the body to leave and read traces of memory.
In this, there will be a kind of “space ” that expands and manifests itself, allowing people to re-shape their own or others ’ past.
In terms of the first impression of reading, Space Species may feel like a difficult book to understand.
But for those who don ’ t want to read anything at all, Species of Space may be a fascinating book, full of interesting associations and many “places ” that people think are worth playing with.
This book is by the French novelist George.
Georges Perec ’ s 1974 book was first published by the French thinker Paul Paulista.
Invited by Paul Virilio.
It is not a novel with a well-defined narrative, but a mental note about space, “place, ” or more like a collection of essays and sketches of associations related to space.
The "space" he talks about is often not what we generally understand, a physical space with a clear geographical location and a certain size, but something that does not have an entity, but seems to be like space, such as: memory, "self" or the so-called "inner space".
The first chapter of "Space Species" is "Paper Pages", the author quotes a Belgian writer Henri Michel as the opening: "I write, in order to travel around the self." The first thing that people think of is that writing is an idea that allows people to explore themselves, but the interesting thing is that under the operation of Perec, he also makes people wonder that people need to write themselves because they have themselves. Not writing is a tool for exploring the self, but the self is a tool for writing to express itself, and writing is the goal that the self is pursuing.
In the process of writing and reading, people imagine a space that is like a “self. ”
Before this, what is written may never be a "self", but a "space" in which the self desires to live.
Perec then wrote several pages of text (see Figure 1) that had little or no real meaning because they were a language of constant self-referencing.
In the first paragraph, he kept writing "I write", "I write", as if he wanted to write a lot of things, but in the end he wrote nothing but "I write".
Below is “I ’ m drawing words on a page. ”
One letter after another, the article gradually took shape, established, stabilized, fixed, fixed... "is the same, he came to write the" article ", these words that said he would write a" article "themselves.
Perec portrays a void in a language, a meaninglessness that exists in the meaning of language.
What he wants us to read, it seems, is not the meaning of the text itself, but the space in which the text is located: the paper page.
This is what the author wrote in the foreword:
To read space; this is because our so-called daily life is by no means one-eyed, but opaque, or close to a blind form, a state of anaesthesia.
If you just give a blank sheet of paper, instead of using this seemingly meaningless, self-referential text, people may not even notice the space in which the text is located.
Does this imply that the meaning of language is often an anaesthetic? We read meaning and therefore ignore the space in which the meaning lives? In this case, what is “space ” and how is it perceived?
Perec's writing in "The Pages" is not about writing the meaning of writing, but about the traces left by the writing itself, including the appearance of these symbols and their place in space.
These traces are like the ruins of a building, the original building itself is what, we no longer know, the only can rely on, only in the new scenery, looking for the traces of his remnants, has lost meaning, can let us observe something, from which to imagine a former "space".
"Space" in this book, therefore, is often not a place for people to simply move and walk, but more like a period of lost time and space, is no longer there "space".
The next two chapters of "Paper Pages" are "Bed" and "Bedroom", which at first glance are observations and analysis of the two places of the bed and the bedroom, but in fact, Perec talks more about these two chapters, but they are a variety of previous memories.
Include which bed he liked best in his impression, why? Which friend gave him it, what he did on it, what was placed next to it, and so on.
In the bedroom chapter, he talks about his experiences as a young student and the bedroom in which he lived.
The resurrected bedroom space is enough to awaken, redeem, and evoke memories, whether the most momentary, the most inexplicable, or the most refined.
The very definite general feeling of my body lying on the bed, and the very certainty of the bed ’ s position in the room, can activate my memory … It is like recalling a word from a dream that, once written, revives the whole memory of the dream.
Here we see the book “written ” again.
It seems that "Space Species" is not just asking: What is "space"? It is also asking: What is "writing"?
For Perec and this book, “writing ” means not simply words, nor mere words, but the use of the body to leave and read traces of memory.
In this, there will be a kind of “space ” that expands and manifests itself, allowing people to re-shape their own or others ’ past.
Gaston Bachelard wrote well in The Poetics of Space: "Space, is the oscillation of images", and memory is such a "space", an inner, imaginary building that allows us to live with the "other" in our hearts.
However, the appearance of this "space" is often expressed and stimulated through various traces left by things in life.
Once the traces disappear or are unrecognizable, they may be forgotten.
Unless we write it down in writing and let it be a memory — the traces left by this invisible space.
The following chapters of Space Species are: Apartment, Building, Street, Community, City, Countryside, Country, Europe, Old Continent, New World, World, and Space.
We can notice that Perec is slowly moving from private space to public space, from private memory to the “space ” where collective and historical memories are born.
These collective and historical memories are time and space that are no longer there, yet they still leave some traces.
But Perec not only pays attention to the "space" of history, but also wants us to question whether the "space" of the present really exists.
In "Countryside", he immediately told us that "Countryside" is actually an illusion, such a "space" does not really exist, just a kind of scenery that people choose to see.
In addition, in the seemingly huge "space" chapters of "country", "Europe", "old continent", "new continent" and so on, Perec unexpectedly did not write anything, in "Europe" he only wrote: "one of the five major parts of the world"; "old continent" he only wrote: "Europe, Asia, Africa". There is nothing to write about, and even like "country", it may not exist at all, but the scenery we think we are.
In “State, ” he asked,“ What is the border? ”
It is clear that he is only a line in the picture, but in order to cross this line, many people have lost their lives, and some people just cross this line, and people on the other side can no longer shoot him.
I want a solid place to be, immovable, immovable, untouched and almost untouchable, unalterable, deeply rooted; a place to be, a place to be, a place to be, a place to be, a place to be, a place to be, a place to be, a place to be, a place to be, a place of origin, a source …
Such a place does not exist, space is no longer a problem, no longer taken for granted, no longer can be merged, no longer owned.
Space is a question: I must constantly mark it, identify it; it is never mine, it is never given to me, and I must conquer it.
My space is fragile: time will consume it and destroy it; everything will no longer be as it used to be, my memories will betray me, and forgetfulness will seep into my memory.
Space dissolves like sand is lost between fingers.
Time won, but left me only the shapeless pieces:
Write: Carefully try to keep a little something, let them live; grab a little piece of reality from the emptiness, and leave a trace, a trace, a sign, or a few symbols somewhere.
This is the last paragraph of the last chapter of Space Species.
He said, “Space is a problem. ”
It has never been a fixed place of a certain size, but like “countries ”,“ Europe ” and “continents ”, it is always changing, dissolving and merging, and people can only constantly identify and mark their past, present and possible future.
This is probably why this book is called Space, but he began writing and finally wrote the topic. As if to tell us, "space species" is actually a writing species.
People leave their traces in all parts of the world in order to portray and create the space where they once lived.
It is in people ’ s different writing that “space ” becomes a strange kind of doubt, oscillating in people ’ s hearts.
And literature, it is from the birth of the written experiment.
As in this book, create and recreate public and private spaces that are no longer available and possible in a scripted experiment.
Extended reading
Editor-in-Chief: Pang Bohan
Editor ： Weng Shihang
Tags:

This report aims to provide an understanding of how the genre has transformed from its early roots with authors like H.

Title:

Content: Sunday Literature: 100 years ago, the watershed of modern literature
Post Date ： 2022 年 01 月 02 日
We are taking a heavy step forward to 2022.
Looking back 100 years ago in 1922, the English literary world was surging, and on February 2, 1922, Joyce ’ s modernist novel Ulysses, published by Shakespeare and Company in Paris, was published on the day of Joyce ’ s 40th birthday. T.S. Eliot ’ s famous book, The Waste Land, was published in The Criterion magazine and quickly shocked the literary world.
These two literary events confirmed that 1922 was a very important year for world literature.
The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster and the Year That Changed Literature The book uses the lives and writings of four English writers as a starting point, and discusses how 1922 became a watershed moment in modern literature.
The preface to The World in Two begins by stating: “Some years are considered key points in history — 1492, 1776, 1865, 1914, 1945, 1968. 1922 marks a watershed in the history of literature. ” 1492 Columbus discovered America; 1776 The American Declaration of Independence was drafted and published; the Civil War ended in 1865 and slavery was abolished.... and...
B. Yeats was born that year); World War I broke out in 1914; World War II ended in 1945; and 1968 was the year of political movements around the globe.
There are many literary stories in 1922, Costeine focused on the four writers of Huff, Eliot, Lawrence, and Foster, who played an extraordinary creative role in the year, and Costeine ’ s focus was not on publishing, but on writing.
All four of them were in deep depression at the beginning of 1922 and felt overwhelmed.
But all of a sudden, they all changed, and Hulf began to write Mrs. Dalloway, and Foster picked up the old manuscript and wrote A Passage to India, which Costeine said inspired them by reading the first volume of Proust ’ s “à la recherche du temps perdu. ” It has been going on since 1922.
As for Lawrence, he embarked on a long journey to write his autobiographical novel, Kangaroo, during his stay in Australia.
Eliot is, of course, with Ezra Pound in Paris, and has made extensive changes to The Wasteland.
Looking back at the twists and turns of the four writers in 1922, Goldstein describes their “creative struggles and triumphs, as well as private dramatic events — nervous breakdown, chronic illness, extreme loneliness, isolation and depression, not to mention the difficulties of love and marriage, and legal and financial problems — behind a common thread. ” By 1922, nearly four years after the Armistice, each of them was finally able to respond creatively."
I might as well quote the relevant information in and outside the book to see how the four writers came out of their personal difficulties.
Flow of Consciousness and New Perspectives: Hulf ’ s Lady Dalloway
In 1922, at the age of 40, she married political theorist Leonard Woolf for 10 years, the fifth anniversary of the couple ’ s founding of Hogarth Press.
Good things are hard, entering the new year, Hulf is suffering from a cold, can not sleep, and even is distracted by the thought of death.
In 1922, Hulf wrote Madame Dalloway, a monograph published in 1925.
The main structure of the novel is Clarissa Dalloway ’ s day, on which Mrs. Dalloway prepares to hold an evening party at her home, and through Mrs. Dalloway ’ s flow of consciousness, we learn about her past and life, including her refusal to marry Peter.
On the other hand, Hoover portrays Septimus, a retired soldier from World War I, who committed suicide after suffering a mental disorder due to hallucinations caused by the trauma of the war.
Hulf was influenced by Proust but went out of her own literary path, writing in her diary on 14 October: "Madame Dalloway has been conceived as a book in which I will study abnormalities and suicides, and see the world through the eyes of both the healthy and the mentally ill — something like that."
Continue reading Forster ’ s Journey to India
After four novels, Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room with a View, and Howards End, Foster hasn ’ t seen a new novel in more than a decade.
During this period, the world turned upside down and the First World War broke out, Foster was a conscientious objector and worked for the British Red Cross in Alexandria, Egypt.
In 1921, Foster made his second visit to India as secretary of Tukojirao III, Maharaja of Devas, India. In 1922, Foster returned to England.
At this time, Foster was devastated, and it is no wonder that Hulf wrote in her diary on March 12: "We think he was depressed and almost debilitated."
To come back to Weybridge at 43, to my humble home a mile from the station, to my fussy and stern mother, I think, has lost the respect enjoyed by the Prince of India, has no novels and has lost the power to write them — it ’ s really depressing.
People can't help but feel fear when they reach middle age. "
Two things are mentioned in The World in Two, showing Foster ’ s state. First, the poet Siegfried Sassoon asks T.E. Lawrence ’ s permission to share with Foster his unpublished autobiography Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Lawrence agreed, because he thought back to his appreciation of Howard Manor, but Lawrence had some doubts: “Isn ’ t the author dead long ago? ” as if Foster was living a life after his death.
Another thing was that on March 25, Foster wrote to Hulf ’ s husband, Leonard, asking to meet: “I want to talk to you about my situation. ”
I ’ m reluctant to consult other people, and I know you ’ ll help me if you can. … Will you be in town on Friday, and if you can, can we have lunch together? ” Leonard recorded his activities on Friday, March 31: “Work in the morning, lunch with Foster, Foster talks about his writing. ”
Leonard gave Foster two pieces of advice: give up journalism and read through his own Indian prose and keep writing.
These Indian essays later became Foster ’ s best novel, Journey to India.
The story of Journey to India goes like this: Mrs. Moore and Adela Quested visit Ronny Heaslop, the son of Mrs. Moore, who is a colonial official, to see the real India and consider not marrying Ronny.
They became friends with a young Indian Muslim doctor, Dr. Aziz, who invited them to visit the Marabar Caves.
In the illusion, Adela feels insulted by Aziz, Aziz is arrested, which triggers the interrogation, and the conflict between the British colonial rulers and the Indians is heated up.
Local public school principal Cyril Fielding, a friend of Aziz, believes that Aziz is innocent, and Adela, who finally realizes the truth, also withdrew the charges from the judge.
However, Aziz believes that Fielding has a deep relationship with his enemy, Adela, and has a mustard against Fielding, who returns to England.
At the end of the novel, Fielding and Aziz find it difficult to travel together in Bogor, India, where they talk about politics, and Aziz believes that India will break away from Britain and become an independent country, until then, they become friends.
When The Journey to India was published in 1924, Foster won the important James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Foster was successful and came out of the creative bottleneck. Sixty years later, the British director David Lean made the film, which was David ’ s last work.
The Long Journey: Lawrence "Kangaroo"
Lawrence had always been cynical, and he preferred the natural world.
His fifth novel, Women in Love, a sequel to The Rainbow, was released in the United States in November 1920, the same month Lawrence wrote to publisher Thomas Seltzer, “This is my best book. ”
However, when in June 1921, the "woman in love" was listed in the United Kingdom, and then the bad reviews were hot and the sales were not good.
In late 1921, Lawrence received a letter from Mabel Dodge inviting Lawrence to stay in Taos, New Mexico.
Mabel Dodge is a broad wife, she read Lawrence's travel book "Sea and Sardinia" (Sea and Sardinia), and thought of finding him to Taos, write about the local.
In a letter to Mabel Dodge, Lawrence said that starting in January or February, he was leaving Europe, that he was going to take the next step, and that he liked the name Taos.
The letter Mabel Dodge sent to Lawrence was lost.
But from Lawrence ’ s letter to his friend Donald Carswell: “From Taos, New Mexico, we have a letter. ”
She said that if we wanted, we could live there in a well-furnished brick house and get everything we needed.
Taos seemed to be on a hill — 7,000 feet above sea level — 23 miles from the railroad — where there was a free tribe of 600 Indians.
She told us that the Indians were interesting, that they worshipped the sun, prayed for rain, and had not yet been eroded by modern civilization. "
From Goldstein ’ s Two Worlds to Lawrence ’ s Epistles, it is known that Lawrence is uncertain, and his friend Earl Brewster invites him to stay in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), so will he go east or west?
Since Christmas 1921, Lawrence has been suffering from the flu, unable to sail with the ship in January, only to set sail in February.
He arrived in Ceylon and felt that the climate and environment were not suitable. Six weeks later, Lawrence moved to Australia, where he returned to the world of fiction and finished writing Kangaroo.
Lawrence finally arrived in New Mexico in September.
He wrote to Foster, “I felt that this place was very strange, but I was getting used to it. ”
In 1922, Lawrence embarked on a long journey of continuous exploration, he seems not to have written a very amazing novel, but also nearly completed his most important personal poetry collection, Birds, Beasts and Flowers (Birds, Beasts and Flowers).
For him personally, the trip to America solved his poverty because “The Woman in Love ” sold well in the United States.
A melancholy autobiography: Eliot, The Wasteland.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888, Eliot attended a lecture on philosophy by Henri Bergson at the Sorbonne University in Paris after receiving a bachelor's degree and a master's degree at Harvard University. Married to the dancer Vivienne Haigh-Wood, this marriage did not bring happiness, but brought poetry, of course, the Wasteland.
In 1916, Eliot's doctoral dissertation was completed, but he did not intend to return to the United States, and the oral examination was not completed.
Elliot worked at Lloyds Bank. In October 1921, Elliot took a three-month leave from the bank because of a nervous breakdown. He passed through Paris, visited Pound, and then went to Lausanne, Switzerland, for treatment. In 1922, Elliot returned to Paris, and the work remained unchanged, that is, to modify the Wasteland with Pound.
On June 23, Hulf wrote about Eliot ’ s recitation of “The Wasteland ” in his diary. Hulf appreciated the poem and wrote the words of his friend, Mary Hutchinson, who was listening together:“ This is Eliot ’ s autobiography, melancholy. ” Eliot agreed that he devoted his life to poetry, which is not easy to understand. At the same time, the poem contains views on society, the spiritual field, the relationship between men and women, and so on.
Eliot published "The Wasteland" in the first issue of his editor's standard magazine, which gained attention and success.
Costeine ’ s The World in Two concludes with two lines from Eliot ’ s Little Gidding, the last of the Four Quartets, written during World War II, on the themes of time, religious revelation, and redemption.
I quote the original work and the translation of Zhang Ziqing as follows, which has a certain meaning for us.
For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
“Because last year ’ s words belong to last year ’ s language,
And next year, we are waiting for another voice. "
by Vincent Cheng
Art • Liu Ruoji
Editor • Kwan Hsiao-yang
Email • literature @ mingpao.com
fb: http: / / www.facebook.com / SundayMingpao

Title:

Content: The Footprints of the Gods: Is it an alternative science or pseudoscience that developed a high civilization in the Americas 12,000 years ago?
Photo Credit: iStock
What we want you to know is
Twenty-five years of research and development have brought together clues from archaeology, genetics, astronomy, meteorology, agricultural economics, anthropology, geology, and paleontology to provide the most complete explanation of the mystery of the lost civilization.
Text: Pan Grace (Translator of this book, Ph.D., Department of Foreign Languages, Chung Cheng University)
Alternative science or pseudoscience?
In this book, you will often see an era, which is "12,800 years ago."
This number represents the time when an earth-destroying event occurred, and this event is also the focus of Hancock's discussion.
According to his research, 12,800 years ago, the Earth was hit by a series of meteorites over a period of 21 years.
The point of Hancock ’ s argument in this book is that mankind developed a very high civilization in the Americas at a much older age than 12,800 years ago.
But because of the scale and destructive force of that catastrophe, this high civilization has since disappeared from human history.
You may think that the current civilization of mankind is so advanced that it is necessary to care about a primitive civilization that has disappeared and is likely to remain in the Stone Age?
Linguist Noam Chomsky had a debate with sociologist Michel Foucault.
Hunsky argued, “The human mind has remained essentially unchanged since the 17th century; perhaps nothing has changed since the time of the Cro-Magnon. ”
He later added: “If a human being who lived 5,000 years ago or 20,000 years ago is placed in modern society as a child, he can learn just as well as the average human. ”
He may be a genius or a lunatic, but in essence he is no different from modern man. "
Sigmund Freud in "The Future of an Illusion," journalist and biologist Matt Ridley in "The Red Queen," also expressed a similar view.
In other words, since the emergence of human beings, his physiological structure has not changed much.
After all, when it comes to evolution, hundreds of thousands of years is a very short time, not enough for a species to naturally evolve into a new species.
The vast majority of the differences between modern and ancient hunter gatherers are due to acquired training.
When we live by the rules of civilized society, the instincts and impulses of ancient hunter gatherers remain in our minds.
Even in terms of physiology, we are no different from the Clomanon people of 40,000 years ago, but in terms of technology, our mobile phones and computers are much more advanced than their stone knives and axes.
But the question is, can you assemble a mobile phone or a computer from scratch on your own? Although modern people have advanced civilization, the current civilization is only the cumulative result of a long time, and it is only fragmented and stored in each individual.
In this book, Hancock has used the term "compulsory amnesia" to describe the destruction of ancient sites in the United States by the government and consortia.
Since civilization is the result of accumulation, if we find an ancient civilization that flourished for a long time and let its ruins be abandoned or destroyed, these memories will disappear.
In Japanese legend, the islands of Japan did not exist at first.
A long time ago, a pair of brothers and sisters of God came to the sea and took up long spears to stir the sea, and the drops of water dripping from the tip of the spear formed an island in the sea.
The brothers and sisters came to the island and then gave birth to the islands of Japan.
The importance of this legend is that it shows when human memory loss began.
This period coincides with the important period mentioned repeatedly by Hancock in this book, 12,000 years ago.
In ancient times, when sea levels fell, the islands of Japan did not exist.
They are only a small part of the earth.
It was not until the sea level rose 12,000 years ago that this narrow land mass separated from the mainland and became the islands of Japan.
This myth reveals a few messages.
First, it was created after the great calamity that Hancock spoke of, because the islands of Japan did not exist 12,000 years ago.
From this, it is very likely that the catastrophe also had a major impact on the region where Japan was at that time, causing the memory of those who lived there to be lost.
In addition, it can also be seen from this legend that man is eager to know his source, and he will even fabricate stories to satisfy this desire when the roots are no longer known.
But in order to regain the common memory of mankind, the forces that must be confronted are not just governments and consortia.
According to Hancock, the greatest obstacle to his investigation of the truth came from the archaeological community.
At the beginning of the 20th century, many scholars believed that civilization in the Americas developed much later than in the rest of the world, and that human beings appeared less than 4,000 years ago.
This view is known as the "modern origin of mankind in the New World", and the most influential person supporting this theory was Alessie Haideluca, who served as the head of the Department of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington for 40 years from 1903 to 1943. Human activity has already taken place, but in order to strengthen his authority in the archaeological community, Haideluca has always vigorously refuted these new evidence, arguing that they are completely devoid of research value.
In 1929, the skeletons of some Ice Age mammals were discovered at a site near Clovis, New Mexico.
In subsequent years of excavations, archaeologists have shown from this site that human activity in the Americas began at least 12,000 years ago.
But it was not until the death of Haider Luke in 1943 that this new view became a consensus among archaeologists.
In 1964, after the archaeologist Vance Haynes published a paper in the journal Science on the Clovis site, this new understanding of the archaeological community finally came to be known as the "Clovis First" theory.
Haynes's theory is that the earliest Native Americans came from Eurasia to present-day Alaska when sea levels fell across the Bering Land Bridge.
Because the northern part of North America was covered by an extremely thick ice sheet, these immigrants did not come to the southern part of North America until the advent of ice-free corridors 14,100 years ago.
Like Hyde Luke, Haines became the new hegemon of archaeology; like Hyde Luke, Haines began to suppress dissent.
Hynes is still alive, so Clovis' first theory is still a dark cloud over the archaeological world.
In 1992, during road work in California, the bones of a mastodon were found. The bones showed signs of artificial drill chisels, and there were also stone hammers and anvils nearby.
In addition, the skeleton, named the Serudi mastodon, was dated to 130,000 years ago.
It is currently housed in the Paleontology Museum of Natural History in San Diego.
In an interview with Hancock, the curator of paleontology, Tom de Meere, said that he also struggled to gamble on his academic future and published the discovery in the well-known journal Nature.
There are many similarities between academic research and chess.
In chess, for example, all chess games from ancient times to the present are just different variations of the same game.
Combining the various chess changes becomes a labyrinth of tree-like structures.
Isn ’ t that the same with academic research?
Each theory is just a fork in the maze of knowledge, and each fork is followed by a complex maze.
The purpose of academic research is not necessarily to find a way out of the labyrinth. After all, our civilization is still just one corner of the labyrinth after thousands of years of exploration.
But as long as you can continue to drill down in the known fork, or find another way out, this is an incredible achievement.
Pythagoras believed that the whole universe could be described in whole numbers.
But in the case of a square with one edge, its diagonal line is an irrational number that cannot be described by an integer or by the ratio of an integer.
This was also discovered by Pythagoras' disciple Hipasus, who suggested to Pythagoras that mathematics might have a wider sky beyond the maze of rational numbers composed of the ratio of integers to integers.
It is said that this mathematician, who was born two or three hundred years earlier than Qu Yuan, was also hit by the water, and finally pushed into the Aegean Sea by Teacher Bi.
Similarly, Newton believed that the particle labyrinth was all about the physical labyrinth.
If it hadn ’ t been for this physical overlord ’ s insistence, quantum mechanics might have emerged a hundred years earlier.
We often compare the academic world to an ivory tower, thinking that there are a group of scholars who do not eat human fireworks and devote themselves to research.
But as Hancock describes in his book, academia is more like a jungle than an ivory tower.
In order to monopolize resources and establish authority, successive hegemonists in the field of archaeology also want to force other archaeologists to admit that one corner of the archaeological maze they know is the whole of archaeology.
Hancock ’ s theory gained notoriety for pseudoscience in part because of his years of bumping into mainstream theories in archaeology.
According to his own account, he was very prescient. As the archaeological evidence continued to emerge, his theories, especially his views on the New Fairy Wood event, have gained increasing support in the archaeological community. And...
But to be honest, Hancock is hard to compare with these two masters.
At the beginning of the formation of every culture, it is inevitable that there is a belief in God.
This is because science at the time did not understand many phenomena.
Faith can provide some answers, but it can also lead to more questions.
If the world was created by God, who created it? If the land is held by a giant turtle, who is holding the giant turtle?
Hancock's theory has a similar problem.
And the big turtle that holds up Hancock ’ s theory is what he calls “some lost civilization. ”
Why does the narrative in the Book of the Dead in ancient Egypt have much in common with the beliefs of the much later Mississippi civilization on the other side of the world?
Hancock ’ s answer is that it is because both civilizations originated from a much older, advanced civilization.
As to the origin and development of this civilization, he did not explain much.
Why do ancient monuments around the world often have astronomical alignment lines aligned in the same direction? According to Hancock, this is also due to the emergence of a technologically advanced civilization on the ancient island of Turtle.
After the devastation of the catastrophe 12,800 years ago, the survivors of this civilization traveled by boat around the world, teaching the locals to build large-scale projects and hiding the secrets of rebuilding civilization in the structures of those projects.
If his claim is true, are the bees that build hexagonal lattice structures in the world all derived from some ancient bee civilization?
God is impossible.
For Hancock, this lost civilization is almost like a god, so it is also Hancock's panacea for all kinds of problems.
In the case of Saxe Huaman in Peru, the site is made up of several jagged megalithic walls, each of which is made of polygonal blocks of varying sizes and shapes.
Each stone block is so tightly embedded that the stone seam is so thin that even a piece of paper can not be stuffed in.
There are many similar ancient monuments that modern scientists have tried in various ways and have been unable to replicate the process of their construction.
But Hancock believes that the lost civilization he believes in has developed technology that transcends the principle of leverage and mechanical mechanics, allowing the boulders to be “lifted, placed, softened and shaped ” through meditation and the playing of musical instruments.
Now that this civilization has been able to transcend the limits of modern physics, you cannot discuss its existence from a rational point of view, because the question has fallen to the level of faith or unbelief.
Finally, the conclusion of the book.
Hancock concludes his book by saying that the catastrophe of 12,800 years ago was caused by the destruction of “the balance between the earth and the stars. ”
The reason why he wanted to preach the end times in the book is to make sure that mankind does not repeat the mistakes.
We will not discuss whether or not Hancock is in the public's favor, but only focus on the study of knowledge.
Knowledge should not be utilitarian or purposeful.
Perhaps it should be said that knowledge is a kind of existence that transcends human beings.
Human beings can explore knowledge, but knowledge does not change for human beings and does not care for human interests.
For example, if there is gravity in the universe, it did not exist until humans evolved on Earth, nor did it exist for the purpose of fixing humans on Earth.
The New Fairy Wood event, described in Hancock's book, was caused by fragments of a comet that were torn apart by the gravity of the Solar System.
It is highly unlikely that such a galactic event occurred because humans destroyed the peace of the universe.
If mankind has attracted a large number of meteorites due to various causes, then what is the sin of the moon and Mars, and why do they end up in a state of devastation?
But perhaps in a more technologically advanced future, we can find the fossils of malevolent aliens on the moon and Mars, and also give Hancock a clean slate.
Footprints of the Gods: Before the New Fairy Wood Event, North America had 117,000 years to develop a high civilization
Book Introduction
This excerpt is from Footprints of the Gods: The Key to a Lost Civilization, published by Shang Zhou
Author: Graham Hancock
By the grace of God.
• momo online bookstore
• Readmoo Ink Reading E-book
• Enter TNL83 at Pubu E-Bookstore checkout to enjoy 83% off sitewide (excluding some items, such as physical, adult and designated items, cannot be combined with other offers)
• If you purchase the book through the links above, Key Review Network will receive a score profit from it.
The world ’ s best-selling 100 million copies of the classic “God ’ s Fingerprint ”, the latest masterpiece by Graham Hancock, the authority of ancient civilization!
The latest archaeological and DNA evidence will unravel the mystery that America is not the New World!
The Mystery of American DNA / The Scientific Mystery of the Amazon Rainforest / The Astronomy and Geometry Hidden in Earthwork / Similar Souls of North America and Ancient Egypt...
Before the disaster of the New Fairy Wood Period, what had happened to the American continent?
Did the global catastrophe at the end of the last ice age erase an advanced civilization from history?
The world ’ s best-selling author, Graham Hancock, has spent his life trying to find the answer to this question.
In this book, he corroborates his research with the latest archaeological and DNA evidence and comes up with an amazing conclusion!
• 200,000 copies sold! # 8 on the Sunday Times bestseller list in the UK and # 6 on the New York Times bestseller list in the US!
• Ranked 1st in the “Prehistory ” of Amazon in the United States! Readers recommend 4.7 stars!
Twenty-five years of research and development have brought together clues from archaeology, genetics, astronomy, meteorology, agricultural economics, anthropology, geology, and paleontology to provide the most complete explanation of the mystery of the lost civilization.
Did humans exist in America 130,000 years ago?
• Does the Amazon Rainforest Tribe have a strong message of Australasian DNA?
• The “black soil ” in the rain forest can turn the wasteland into fertile soil and has amazing resilience?
• Did the North American civilization of Mississippi and the ancient Egyptian civilization have the same concept of spiritual home?
• Ancient sacred buildings around the world have important scientific “myths ”?
Did the global cataclysm at the end of the last ice age erase an advanced civilization from history? With the advent of new discoveries, we now know that human beings existed in the Americas as early as 130,000 years ago, and it was not until tens of thousands of years later that humans began to settle on other continents.
In the book, Hancock describes his experiences in research and his interactions with scientists who have made important new discoveries.
After visiting areas such as the Mississippi River Valley and the Amazon rainforest, he discovered that the culture of the ancient "New World" and the "Old World" culture, which is completely unrelated to the theory, have inherited the same set of advanced scientific knowledge and complex spiritual beliefs.
Does this mean that archaeologists, in their search for the origins of civilization, have focused only on the study of the “Old Continent, ” thus ignoring the unimaginable possibility that the origin of civilization might be in the“ New World. ”
Hancock ’ s many books published over the decades have been loved by millions of readers.
God ’ s Word is more powerful than His Word.
The exploration of ancient mysteries in this book will certainly open your eyes.
In addition, Hancock introduces amazing archaeological discoveries and makes a deep reflection on modern life “in the mirror of antiquity ”.
Editor-in-Chief: Weng Shihang
Editor-in-chief: Wang Zupeng
Tags:

Title:

Content: November 16, 2022
16 November 2022 ° C
When do they disbelieve in science?
+ - 0 Read
The human science is developing, this is a fact that does not contradict anyone, and the meaning of its development is that it accumulates and regenerates, so to reach new scientific discoveries requires continuous research, intensification of efforts, accumulation of experiences, succession of failure and success, right wrong, correction and correction..
This clear fact has many dimensions and results in serious facts, the clearest and most obvious of which is that science is exploratory, that is, whenever it develops discovered what was unknown, and corrected what was wrong, and this explains to us the emergence of a scientific theory on the ruins of another scientific theory, criticizes it and comes with a new interpretation entirely, alternative to the previous theory or a relatively new interpretation of it fundamentally or outwardly.
What does that mean?
It means that the scientific facts, including what is categorical people do not differ, and some of what is relative can not be cut, and may invalidate future research and may prove and may modify, science is the agreement of the wise and scientists is not all categorical, and does not represent the absolute truth, this is the first fact.
The second fact is that science, despite its terrible development in the last few centuries, and especially in the last decades, is still very little compared to what is unknown.
The majority of scientists agree and agree that the percentage of what they know of the universe is very little, estimated by most of them about: about 5%, which is almost negligible, and the truth of God Gal in the above: {And what you were given of science only a little}, and who is ignorant more than he knows, but what he knows is not worth anything in front of what he is ignorant, he has no right to argue science, and he has no right to infer science. Because the probability of his error — due to the amplitude of his ignorance — is greater and greater and greater than the probability of his injury!
This cannot be contradicted by reason.
The third fact is that science is only a discovery of the laws that made this universe run in extreme accuracy and harmony and miraculous greatness, science explains natural phenomena and seeks to discover the laws that govern them, only, and scientists often make mistakes in deciding these laws because of their limited minds and limited possibilities. Or change it!
Islam is the true religion that Allah has revealed to man so that he can follow his law until he achieves his interests in his world and his last. He does not know the truth of things as they are, and his knowledge is a minor very limited, because if humans do not know about the universe and it is at their disposal they study it and search for its secrets only 5% they do not know about man himself and his soul much less, but the world of the unseen they know nothing about him except what the miraculous revelation told them!
The fact that Islam is the laws of God Almighty, which made it regulate the relations of man with others, and what science discovers by nature are the laws made by God Almighty to regulate the course and rhythm of the universe confirms that it is impossible to contradict the facts of Islam with the facts of science except when ignorant, ignorant of Islam or ignorant of science.
In fact, there are some people who claim that they believe only in science, and they say, “I don ’ t believe in science. ”
However, this is a blatant fallacy, as its owners seem to start from the premise that what is decided by revelation and religion is ignorance, and science is what is produced by laboratories and research only...!
Although all rational people and all scientists, as we mentioned, agree that research, studies and theories may be wrong in whole or in part, and that researchers and scholars, whatever they reach from science, are prone to error, shortcomings and bias, and that what is decided by revelation and religion facts are often far from what science is involved in, and the field of science is often far from the field of religion and its provisions!
Which shows us the absurdity, the small minds and the limited horizon of those who try to imagine a battle between the definitive facts of religion and the theories of science!
But the most important question here is, do they really believe in science?
Or is it just a matter of God ’ s judgment?
The obvious truth is that these are flocks of people who have filled the world with noise: We believe only in science!
We believe only in science!
They are the first to disbelieve in science if it is an argument that supports the legitimate rule and confirms it!
The proof of this is that everyone knows that Islam considers alcohol from the major: {O you who believe, alcohol, gambling, monuments and Islam is an abomination of the work of Satan, so avoid it so that you may succeed * Satan wants to cause enmity and hatred between you in alcohol and gambling and repels you from mentioning God and prayer are you finished}, and all scientific studies confirm the damage of alcohol on human health and dangers to families and societies. He knows the heavy cost of curing the devastation caused by alcohol and addiction.
But here they are disbelieving in science, they are hostile to Islam!
And everyone knows that Islam prohibited homosexuality, and promised him from the great sins and the most terrible obscenities and disgusted: {And Lot said to his people, Do you come to obscenity what preceded you from one of the worlds * You come to men lust without women, but you are a people extravagant}, and all scientific studies proved that homosexuality is a cause of deadly sexual diseases, and its psychological and social effects are more deadly. Science is against Islam!
And Lot said to his people, "Do you come with indecency while you see?" They do what they know is harmful and dangerous, and that is true ignorance.
Like sodomy, adultery, usury and all that Islam has forbidden, scientific research and repeated studies carried out by the Westerners themselves proved that it is a destruction to mankind, but they disbelieve in the science that they claim that they do not believe except in it.
If only our young people knew the truth of this scientific hypocrisy, and if only they understood the phenomenon: when do they disbelieve in science?
* Imam and Professor of Sharia at the High School of Professors
Share your opinion

Title:

Content: Can technology help writers write?
• Bernd Debusman Jr.
• Reporter of Economic and Business Affairs
The famous American author Mark Twain was strongly frowned upon by those who thought it was possible for someone to learn how to write a novel.
One of his famous sayings on the subject is: “He who is not born with the queen of writing a novel will inevitably have a hard time trying to write a novel. ”
“If a person doesn ’ t have a clear idea of their story, that necessarily means that, in fact, they don ’ t have a story, ” he said.
British writer Stephen Fry has another way of framing the idea: Successful authors are those who know how difficult it is to write a book.
About 2.2 million books are published each year worldwide, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which monitors and counts books.
This figure includes both fictional novels and non-fictional works.
For most of these authors, the writing process has remained relatively unchanged since Twain was at the peak of his glory and giving in the late 19th century.
The process begins by outlining the plot and ideas, and then gradually decoding, developing and refining them over time.
But these days, the effectiveness of technology is growing in making the life of an author a little easier.
For Michael Green, an American statistician and data scientist turned novelist, the need to use technology to simplify the writing process and make it seamless came when he was in the middle of writing his first book.
After writing 500 pages of a complex story, he reached a point where he felt the process was becoming difficult to manage: “In the midst of editing, I reached a point where I started to feel like I had a lot of plots and characters. ”
“I had all these documents about the deeper aspects of the world I was working on creating.
I was worried about being able to track all the leads.
That ’ s the point where I turned again to my data science methodology to solve a complex, complex problem that has so many aspects and details. ”
The end result was that Green created Lynit, a digital platform that helps authors visualize, plan, and weave together the different elements, such as characters, plot aspects, themes, and major events, that make up the story.
The app is now in its experimental phase, and is being tested by a number of writers.
It is currently free, and enables users to draw and update complex digital templates or story maps.
Greene says many novelists start their work with more than just a general idea of a particular plot or character.
He says the process of adding Lynette to this initial idea is simple and easy.
“When a new idea shines in the mind of an author who wants to insert it into the story, he is able to insert it into a natural framework.
They are building a vision. ”
“They develop the story by adding one part after another, and as new ideas emerge, they make changes and adjustments, perhaps by creating new nodes (or interactions), or new relationships. ”
Technology is increasingly being harnessed once a writer has published his book to help authors connect with their readers.
This can be through the simple use of social media, as some writers welcome lengthy chats with their audience.
But there are other ways, where authors can turn to specialized companies such as Chicago-based Hiitide.
Its website and app allow writers to participate in live paid Q & A sessions with their readers.
Authors of self-help and self-development books can create and earn money through educational courses.
Ivan Shay, CEO of Hiitide, says the courses are “copies of writing workshops about a particular book. ”
“It helps you better understand the material and integrate its principles into everyday life. ”
As an example, he points to Ryan Holliday ’ s book The Obstacle is the Way: The Immortal Art of Turning Attempts into Triumphs, which draws its inspiration largely from Stoic Philosophy (an ancient Greek philosophical school that essentially holds that emotions are caused by errors in judging things and that a wise man does not suffer from such feelings).
“Users not only learn about Stoicism through the Hightide cycle, they can identify the virtues they want to embody and then follow them on a daily basis, ” Shay says.
“They can also participate in a Q & A seminar with author Ryan Holliday about his book. ”
Another tech company, California-based Crazy Maple Studios, says it ’ s helping authors revive their books.
Instead of giving readers just words in lines, its four apps, Chapters Scream, Spotlight and Kiss, add animations, music, sound effects and even games to digital books, enabling the reader to decide what the character does.
Joy Jia, the company ’ s founder and CEO, said: “The digital revolution and the emergence of digital readers (who rely on reading across digital devices) have brought about the first major transformation of the publishing industry. ”
Jia suggests that authors are more likely to employ technology as a result of the need to compete in a world where readers have many choices about how to spend their free time.
But experts still warn against over-reliance on technologies meant to help writers.
“Technology can be distracting, especially if you ’ re one step away from social media, or you ’ ve been trapped searching for a topic for too long, ” says Melissa Huffman, a trainer and ghost author.
“Five quick minutes you intended to take as a break can sometimes turn into hours of wasted writing time.
One of the tips I ’ m going to give on technology is to find work that fits your personality and writing styles, and then use it. ”
“But authors can sometimes fall into the trap of trying everything in the hope that they will find the magic tool, which can actually turn out to be another distraction. ”
But Michael Green believes that technology will take a more prominent place when it glitters the new generation of tech-oriented writers.
“What I ’ m seeing in Generation 21 and even younger writers is that they ’ re looking for technology to give them direction, they ’ re simply seeing it as a tool to learn and grow, rather than as work and extra effort, ” he says.

Title:

Content: Literature in the Age of AI: Is literature necessarily created by humans?
Post Date: May 14, 2023
[Ming Pao News] Fiction writer Dong Kai-chang recently published an article entitled “Literary Writing in the Age of AI King ’ s Landing ”, which explores how literature is facing the impact caused by ChatGPT artificial intelligence technology.
There is an appendix at the end of the article, which is that Dong Kaizhang sent a prompt to ChatGPT to let the artificial intelligence write an article on the same topic.
For the language performance of chatbots such as ChatGPT, the general population has the following two judgments: First, when generating practical articles (we do not need to "write" this verb to describe human actions), or when there is a type of text with a given format and structure, artificial intelligence performs very well, it generates far faster than human writing, and is more accurate and stable in format control than human beings. Will (or has been) replaced by AI "; the second is that the literary level of artificial intelligence generation language is not high, the article is formulaic, the form and content seem to be generated according to a specific routine, often giving people a sense of mediocrity.
If you compare this article with the version of the article that he let ChatGPT generate, you can confirm the above impression, the central idea of the two articles is not much different, in simple terms: humans can apply artificial intelligence to help write, but the unique creativity of human beings can not be replaced by artificial intelligence.
The biggest difference between the two articles is actually the literary level of the language: the ChatGPT article, which reads like a manifesto or report full of routines, similar to the common text of the content farm; and the article of Dong Kaizhang is eloquent, tortuous and in-depth, and also contains a large number of references to different theoretical theories and literary examples. You will not feel mediocre and formulaic, no matter what the point of view is.
This small word game echoes the theme of the article: Humanity (Dong Qizhang) is still unique, at least at this stage, artificial intelligence (ChatGPT) is not a substitute for human beings when writing this kind of literary criticism - it is not clear whether this significance is intentional by Dong Qizhang, but it reflects the leaping development of artificial intelligence language generation technology (Dong ’ s saying is “AI King ’ s time ”). The common complex is to defend the uniqueness of humanity as a literary producer.
It is undeniable that it is mixed with a lot of anxiety, but at the same time consciously avoid falling into excessive technological fear (technophobia), so it took a cautious attitude of understanding, first to identify the difference between (current) mechanically generated language and human literary language, and then try to prove that there is a most fundamental and essential thing in human literature, which artificial intelligence cannot imitate.
Under this condition, human beings, as literary producers, cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence.
What is this “essential thing ” of human literature? In short, creativity.
More specifically, human authors are driven by their own creative desires and then use their linguistic abilities to produce literary texts.
To describe this process clearly is to repeat the process of transforming high-level thinking into language, which may be a problem in psychology, neuroscience, or philosophy, but not as much of a literary concern.
Literature still tends to use more general terms such as "creativity", "literary genius" or "creative consciousness", because literature has always been less concerned with the inner workings of the author's mind.
There are two main issues of concern in literature, one is the author's condition, and the other is the text.
The so-called "author conditions" are the conditions that guide the author's creation.
Literary criticism often discusses the relationship between the author ’ s life and the work. In a broad sense, “life ” refers to the author ’ s experience, including personal experience, social environment, cultural context, and literary tradition.
And "text" refers to the work, under the influence of new criticism, "the author is dead" and the concept of acceptance of theory, we have become quite accustomed to a method of criticism that separates the text from the author and his experience, and only examines the formal content of the text itself.
When judging the literary level of artificial intelligence generation language, we mainly discuss in these two directions: artificial intelligence lacks individual experience, and does not have any "creative" context and context; artificial intelligence generation language can not reach the general level of human literature, they can only effectively operate some practical, literal quality language forms, but can not "create" a unique and original language style like human literature writers.
Dong Qizhang's article puts forward the third direction of judgment: the priori structure of human literary creation.
He refers to a framework that can be called Kant – Jung – Hunsky, that includes Kant ’ s human reason, Jung ’ s collective mind, and Hunsky ’ s universal grammar.
We do not need to know the similarities and differences of the three theories, only need to know the literary imagination in this framework is enough: compared to artificial intelligence, the uniqueness of human literary writers is that humans have a priori literary ability, which (may) include knowledge, imagination, moral sense, and human language ability, but the current artificial intelligence language generation technology does not have this ability. Generative pre-trained transformers, in short, use a large number of ready-made human language text training machines, the machine by mastering the laws of these human languages, simulating the generation of human-like languages.
From this point of view, artificial intelligence does not have any linguistic predecessor structure, because its grasp of language is entirely from "experience".
If we regard "the priori structure of literary creation" as a necessary condition for literary creation, then artificial intelligence naturally does not have the ability to create literature.
Expand the imagination of literature.
All of the above seems to make us do not have to worry too much about the challenges that artificial intelligence brings to human literary creation.
However, this may in turn limit our imagination of literature.
One of the problems is that the criterion of judging “the priori structure of human literary creation ” as“ human beings are unique ” may imply a theoretical contradiction.
The popularity of structuralism in the last century tells us that human subjectivity is not necessarily self-sufficient, and there has been a tension between "people" and "structure", which is also a challenge to humanism.
The good performance of artificial intelligence in language generation has triggered the desire of human beings to reassess themselves. The so-called "human beings are unique" conclusion is in fact to confirm the subjectivity of human beings once again.
However, the "transcendental structure" is a statement of the limitations of human subjectivity, that is, if the "transcendental structure" exists, people's rational thinking, imagination, moral judgment, emotional expression and language must be limited by this structure, and therefore people are not free, but under certain "structure" conditions, in order to realize limited freedom.
This is not even a structuralist argument, and traces of this thought have been traced back to Kant ’ s philosophy.
When we say that there must be a priori structure of literary creation, there is literature, which is not to say that human beings are unique in literary creation.
And just to say that "structure" is the condition of literature, which is precisely the anti-humanist theory of structuralism.
Returning to the topic of artificial intelligence, there is a thought experiment called the Chinese Room, which is a counterattack to the Turing test.
In this experiment, a person who does not understand Chinese can create the illusion that he can speak Chinese using a manual written in English that instructs how to respond to Chinese information in Chinese.
We can change this into a thought experiment called a “literary room ”: suppose we put all the literary works in human history into an artificial intelligence machine, and the artificial intelligence uses these human literary works to train and then imitate the literary language of human beings to produce a work.
We will judge this work on the standard of human literature, it may be an excellent work, or it may be just a mediocre work, but by the work itself, we can not be sure whether it is created by human beings or generated by artificial intelligence, because the style of the work is from human literature.
In fact, this is very similar to Calvino ’ s “literary machine ”. Although Dong Kai-chang pointed out in his article that what Calvino really wants to express must be produced in a specific time and space and personal experience, it is literary creation that we can also, in turn, extend the“ literary machine ” to Roland Bart ’ s “death of the author ” and remove Calvino ’ s humanistic care and regard it only as literary creation. An excellent combination of language symbols.
Judging whether a particular language combination (that is, literary works) is excellent is not related to the source of the production combination (human authors or artificial intelligence), but is a pure reader judgment.
In other words, the "structure of literary creation" does not necessarily exist "priori" in the author's consciousness, but can also be a symbolic structure external to individual human authors, such as: the sum of all literary works in human history.
The so-called "death of the author" is such a literary process: the reader ignores the author and his personal experience behind the work, and only puts the work on a "literary structure" composed of "all the literary works of mankind" for comparison, in order to judge the literary level of the work.
The meaning of a literary work can come not from the author, but from “structure. ”
When we read the "literary works" produced by ChatGPT, we will laugh at the mediocrity of it, and then judge that artificial intelligence can not approach the level of human literature. It is actually not noticed that ChatGPT is not an effective "literary machine". ChatGPT is still only a "language machine" for the time being, it feeds too many people garbage in human languages during training, and can only produce. It is similar to the word farm.
The Hong Kong Literature Museum online program "Arts Online, etc." has two episodes to discuss the topic of literature and artificial intelligence, in the program, the host has proposed that in the rapid development of artificial intelligence language generation, the opportunity of literary creators is as the definition of language.
That is to say, the literary creator is the "literary machine" trainer, the literary creator's work is rich in "literary structure", and "literary structure" is the "literary machine" training model.
The creative form of human-machine integration
On how to use ChatGPT, many people on the Internet quoted mathematician Terence Tao ’ s recent view: Tao believes that artificial intelligence is a variant of Cunningham ’ s Law, that is, “the most effective way to get the right answer is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer. ”
We didn ’ t get a satisfactory answer from ChatGPT ’ s production text, not because of the lack of AI capabilities, but because we didn ’ t provide the appropriate prompt.
Today ’ s AI players understand that wrong prompts produce wrong answers, but wrong answers can inspire you to fix the prompts, so that you can find the right way to get the right answers in the AI ’ s response.
It is important to note that what we find is not the “answer ”, but the“ prompt way to induce the AI to provide the correct answer ”, and in the process, we gradually build up the ways and techniques to give hints to the AI. Dong Kai-chang called it a meta-language in his article, and we can also call it a model of prompts.
In the field of artificial intelligence image generation, players are happy to create models that generate specific style images and share them with other players.
ChatGPT also has a so-called "jailbreak" mode, which uses a "spell" (colloquially known as a hint to artificial intelligence) designed by the developer to let the artificial intelligence role-play, inducing it to destroy the original moral code set by the designer, and generate the "evil" answer the questioner wants to get.
The above interaction between humans and artificial intelligence reveals that a new language is waiting to be born: humans cannot predict exactly what answers artificial intelligence will make, so they must modify the prompts and build a model of the prompts in hopes that artificial intelligence can produce satisfactory answers – it must be noted that the “satisfactory answer ” is not necessarily the“ correct answer ”, which may also be completely unexpected but full of inspiration.
By extension, can we build different literary cue models to induce artificial intelligence to generate literary works that surpass human imagination? Can we expect that artificial intelligence can generate non-human literary works by learning human literature?
Is “literature ” necessarily“ human literature ”? This is the question that artificial intelligence poses to the future of human literature.
Although the purpose of artificial intelligence language generation is still to imitate human language, the mystery of technological development is that we can never accurately predict the future development.
Therefore, when many people are worried and warned that the development of artificial intelligence will bring about a devastating disaster for humanity, it is also clear that the prediction is likely to be wrong.
Similarly, when many people believe that artificial intelligence will never be able to imitate humans in literary creation, that is, let alone the birth of "literary strong artificial intelligence", this judgment is also likely to be wrong.
The misjudgment is that artificial intelligence does not necessarily aim to imitate humans, but may become a literary existence that is different from human beings.
This existence, in turn, changes the pattern and style of human literary creation.
We can even imagine a kind of "literature cyborg": human authors and artificial intelligence together to form a "human-machine integration" of literary creators - this is not a fantasy, but what is happening, in fact, science fiction creators have been doing similar creative experiments.
Or to use a more personal example: we sent creative prompts to ChatGPT to generate text that we could not have anticipated, which is the original form of literary biochemist.
TANG Ching-kin
Art • Liu Ruoji
Edited by Woo Hsien
Email • literature @ mingpao.com
fb: http: / / www.facebook.com / SundayMingpao
Related Words: Dong Kaizhang Deng Zhengjian Chatbot Human Literature Artificial Intelligence Daily Ming Pao - Culture

G.

Title:

Content: Skip to main content
SearchLoginLogin or Signup
Maybe we should give up film criticism.
The 21st century is still nine days away, but for most people, the turn of the century is no different, and every day is still on track.
But I think at the turn of the century, not so long ago, the 1990s and the new century, only 30 years ago, but looking back, it is very, very different.
Published onJul 31, 2023
Maybe we should give up film criticism.
·
The 21st century is still nine days away, but for most people, the turn of the century is no different, and every day is still on track.
But I think at the turn of the century, not so long ago, the 1990s and the new century, only 30 years ago, but looking back, it is very, very different.
I think of today ’ s era of entertainment, movies, TV dramas, online novels, short videos.
Twenty or thirty years might be a good distance, because at that time, there were movies, novels, TV shows, music.
Han Han and Jay Chou, both in 2000, published their first book, with their first album.
But in the past 20 years, movies, music, literature, maybe have been completely different.
I do not want to write this article as a reminder of the past, lest you feel that I have fallen into the trap of "the previous generation is doomed to look down on the next generation", we will wash away some emotional expressions, from the actual details of life, describing the literary and artistic life of the 1990s, and contrast with today's life.
Perhaps in this new decade, looking back is the most appropriate thing to do.
A Frozen Bestseller List
If you focus on the bestseller lists of e-commerce sites for a long time, you will find that the so-called long-tail effect of the Internet has effectively blocked the field of bestsellers.
The book was published in 2014, the book has been a big seller since 2009, the book is still in the top 10 in 1998, the book is still in the top 5 today, and the book is the moon and sixpence published in 2006, the best-selling book from 2014 to today ’ s The Grocer of Relief, the best-selling book from 2015 to today. This includes the best-selling trilogy for decades.
These seven books, along with the possibly fading popularity of Kite Chaser, Ferry Man, and The Island Bookstore, almost lock in the most visible location of most bookstores.
But in the new century or so, the situation is completely not so, when the early involvement in the book e-commerce when the network has just been established, people buy more books or online, compared with the current situation of independent bookstores.
In 1997, Ni Ping published "Days" on the top of the bestseller list, the following spring evening Cui Yongyuan, find the book and Song Dan 's sketches also used the book' s stem, simulation wrote "Moon Zi"; in 1998, Yu Qiuyu 's "Notes on the Mountain". Wang Shuo, who was still writing at that time, published his new novel "Looks Beautiful"; 2000 was Cai's "First Intimate Contact", I think a large number of post-95 and post-00 have not even heard of this person; 2001 is a best-selling book "Poor Dad Rich Dad", which is the only theme that can be sold from that era to the present day, which is also an interesting topic; 2002 is the same wealth to books Who Moved My Cheese topped the charts; then came JK Rowling and her Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in 2003.
These titles allow older readers to immediately return to the era before and after the new century, and to the life of the time.
In those days, the annual book release had the same impact as the movie release today, and I remember every time a Harry Potter book came out, the whole city was the comic boy and the lightning bolt on his forehead.
The stagnation of the bestseller list certainly intuitively reflects our disregard for reading itself, as the top 10 books because of their names and fame become the “introductory ten ” that most people put into their reading habits.
But this introduction is long and difficult to complete, and there is really no other time to read other than these ten books.
This is certainly not to say that people around the new century were more disciplined or knowledgeable than people today.
It was only two years before the establishment of the Chinese cinema system and the subsequent listing of Zhang Yimou's Hero, which ignited the mainland film market.
Home Internet was expensive and slow at that time, OICQ (the predecessor of QQ) was listed for less than a year, and online novels have not yet arisen.
All the bestsellers I mentioned above were the “pop culture ” of the time, a time when books shaped pop culture.
Before and after the new century, Yu Qiuyu's cultural works, famous books by Liu Xiaoqing, Ni Ping, Bai Yansong and other writers, and books by Wang Shuo were the vane of popular culture.
Of course, the most intuitive reason is that the economy is not yet developed, and the publishing industry is a lower ceiling industry than film and music, and the "Internet video" industry is not worth a comparison.
That ’ s why I ’ m writing this article, and I definitely don ’ t want to say that a generation is worse than a generation.
Instead, I want to say a kind of luck of the era, the era I was born in caught up with a kind of good luck, which has become a crisis today.
If we find this fracture through this article, then the good luck of that time can become what we actively shape today.
Especially in the upcoming 20 ’ s.
Two Young People ’ s Literature Accompanied by Adolescence
People around the new century were lucky, and youth literature accompanied their adolescence.
Don ’ t get me wrong, of course, I don ’ t think youth literature has a high artistic and ideological value, but perhaps the growth of people does have a process, expect people in adolescence to "Faust" or "Dream of Red Mansions" to have a huge interest and really get the true shock from it, I am afraid that it is also fueling.
Maybe our generation just got the right thing.
It was a time when people were interested and respectful of serious subjects and the beauty of words.
At that time, the famous "network writer" Annie Baby, published her first collection of essays, "Farewell to Wei'an" in 2000, and if you look back at this book today, the degree of refinement of its text is of course far more than many publications today, let alone today's network literature.
With the advent of the new century, people born around 85 have entered adolescence.
At that time, of course, the youth literature of all kinds of love topics, whether it is the "first intimate contact" in 2000, Han Han's "three doors" in the same year, or Guo Jingming published his first collection of essays, "The Edge of Love and Pain" in 2002, love is the main axis.
This sounds very natural, but in fact, it is not easy, in literature to fall in love, is a bit of a deviant.
So "Annie Baby" in her earliest writing career, because of decadence and concern for love, is still a very "extreme" role.
But the arrival of the new century may make people have more expectations and tolerance for "new things".
"Sprout" magazine, and he led the "new concept composition contest", is a great rebellion against the "traditional composition" form, but at the time, the competition with almost all well-known universities in the country, but also by a number of literary predecessors attention and understanding, is not easy.
Han Han, Guo Jingming, Zhang Yueran and others are all literary stars hatched by this ecology.
Adolescent people always have excess impulses and energy to consume, a large part of which is consumed in literary and artistic works, can be literature, is film, is online fiction, is secondary, is idolatry.
One of the good fortune I try to say is that youth literature before and after the new century does provide a suitable literary nourishment.
The safest answer to the literary and artistic forms of different eras is, of course, that they are all limited by the times, have their own characteristics, and have no higher or lower points.
I certainly don ’ t see it that way, and of course in the WeChat article, nor do I make complex statements, and I point out one of the biggest differences.
That's what impersonation might be.
In junior high school, almost half of my peers were trying to write their own “youth novels, ” reading new conceptual works, and watching the fame of these people who are only three or four years older than themselves.
To say that at that time, the middle school students did not dream that they could make a splash in the "new concept composition" competition, it is unlikely.
And their words become a kind of "adolescent mood" expression model, before and after the new century young people are using the literary way to comb and shape their own adolescent expression, there is no "expression package", there is no "popular language", and there is no established theme and paradigm of today's Internet text.
Everyone has become a space, learning a little bit of Han Han's old age and criticism, Guo Jingming a little bit of delicate emotion, write a variety of words that accumulate up to a short length.
Words are, of course, the easiest to create.
Compared to the second generation, or the rice circle culture generation.
We don ’ t feel the huge threshold at first, whether it ’ s the appalling amount of play on B or the terrible retweets of stars on Weibo.
At that time, the concept of young “fans ” was very weak (this should be the culture that has gradually emerged since the“ super girl voice ” in 2005), and liking a young writer first of all does not mean that he is a “fan ” or a vassal, and first of all does not mean that he is going to the Internet to defend him or express his liking.
Reading youth literature at that time, first of all, meant being able to write similar works, which was at least a creative cultural tendency, and today has been reduced to a consumptive cultural tendency.
I want to be clear, I think that even if one reads Faust and Dream of the Red Chamber in adolescence, it is unlikely that one will have the idea of imitating such a great work.
Today's young people of course have many want to imitate the writing of online novels, but that is more the desire for fame and fortune, today's online novels, has been far from the care of adolescent life.
Three or two brushes, solitude and precipitation
Where does this creativity come from? I want to start with the second brush.
Today, the second brush of a film is already a great affirmation of the quality of the film, and the second brush of a novel is incredible.
This, of course, is not the cause of quality in the first place, but the explosion in the number of consumable literary and artistic works, and there is always something new waiting in front of us.
But around the new century, a second brush of a novel is a common phenomenon, whether it is "Harry Potter" or youth literature, it is natural to read two or three times, because there is not much to see at that time.
This may sound like a lack, but perhaps a moderate lack is the real good fortune.
Imagine you read Han Han ’ s work for the second time, and there is no network dispute waiting for you to attend, and there is not much to talk about with your classmates around you.
"There is not much to talk about" is very strange to people today, for literary works, is not the most talkable?
I would like to point out that today we have a very strange culture – the culture of literary criticism.
It is common today to discuss "literary works" in a variety of ways, but this ability is not actively grasped, but is done by the "church".
It is we have seen and heard countless meticulous discussions, and learned a set of "vocabulary" and mastered a set of "discussion dimensions" before we have the ability.
But in the age of the Triple Door, young people still have to talk about these things and talk to each other about whether they like one of the characters inside, or about the whole of the novel.
If we want to talk more, we can't talk more.
Today's second brush movie is to dig into the details that can be analyzed, but at that time, the second brush of a novel, only once again collided with the emotions in it.
At that time, the young man and the work are alone, this is not a romantic expression, I just want to say that only this solitude, the work and his relationship, is special, can be connected with his own life, and promote his own emotions, until this emotion is large enough to need to be expressed.
So belonging to the kind of "good luck" before and after the new century, is the young people at that time can not escape, with their own adolescence hardship and depression alone and guidance, they continue to exaggerate and ferment the gloomy emotions of adolescence, let people want to "supplement the new words to say sorrow."
Although in the original poem, this sentence is said to be a kind of superficiality, but if superficiality is not fully expressed and advanced at this stage.
Growing up, it always shows up in a different way.
Being precipitated by the superficiality of adolescence forced to express, long-winded, no pictures, no Internet buzzwords, must be spoken in their own words, is the good luck of our generation.
4 Commentators and Expressors
Expressors are good luck.
I think people today also think that they express a lot, and therefore do not know what I am talking about.
Today, speaking of a film, young people are familiar with the "stalk" inside, rhythm, photography, technical school performance, experience school performance, director's past, describing the era, everyone is a critic.
When it comes to the second dimension or the game, they know more.
Of course, I have also been interested in these, and have done such "analysis", but at the turn of the age, I may have to point out a difference, and say that I will try to stay away from these literary and artistic evaluations in the future, and I will not do it again, nor will I read it again.
Because it's a misplaced place of attention.
Very good at commenting, analyzing, disassembling, and devoting attention to the structural "evaluation" of the matter, especially the "objective" evaluation.
You may have blocked your own channel.
For youth literature, after reading a youth novel two or three times, only the emotions and encounters in the book in my mind, and the resonance of my adolescent situation at that time.
For the work itself, there is no expression of desire, but for their own life, for their original complex emotions, but found a lot of can be said to inspire and model.
Today's people to see the film is not so, in the Douban to write a film review, if linked to their own life experience, will appear "too unprofessional".
This allows us to see the film and television drama as a unique reason for literature and art - a kind of "public speaking".
If we pause and think a little, we will find a tendency for everyone to be a film critic.
Which works are better screenwriters? What is photography, what is the service channel, the setting can be divided into the "scene scheduling" high, contact with the times, give a profound analysis of the meaning of the film.
For music and literature, we have not yet grasped such a set of "vocabulary".
As long as you go to the tiger, you can feel how important a movie has become for mainstream men.
On the other hand, before and after the new century, that is the expression and theory far less refined than the present era, facing Han Han or Guo Jingming, whether this work is good, whether it is copied, is not at all in the attention of the young people at that time.
In fact, I am really surprised that people have invested so much enthusiasm in whether Han Han and Guo Jingming are plagiarizing.
This obviously shows that forming an "opinion" on Han Han and Guo Jingming has become the most natural expectation when they come into contact with their works.
This is a huge difference, today's people see a literary work as an "object of evaluation", and he himself is a "person who takes opinions."
The ego is established in the evaluation and likes and dislikes of literary and artistic works. The important thing for every person who comes into contact with literary and artistic works is his "taste", which is like whether he can taste wine and tea.
And in my adolescence to accept "youth literature" people, it is precisely not such a mentality, which will form a very valuable perspective for today.
In that era, the contact with literary works, especially the contact with literature, everyone saw themselves as an “expressionist ”, and the important thing was to what extent the work resonated with my expression, and promoted myself to carry out and complete self-expression in a similar way.
5 Responses to The Age of Vigilance
I reflect on and oppose all "evaluation" of the industry, which is not a common reflection, but standing on the comparison with the new century before and after, I found this huge fracture.
There is a hidden premise to score and comment on movies, books, music, games and so on.
That is, each of us needs to come up with our own opinions about the “literary works ” that we consume, which is important, to like a book, or not to like a book, why to like it, why not to like it, and even become the key to our self-construction.
The ability to talk about the good of a movie, thus defending the high score and evaluation of a movie, becomes a key ability of a person.
Every time the beans are scored, the literary works are talked about in any place, and the quality is analyzed according to some terms and structures, and the subject is more and more molded into a "person with personal likes and dislikes."
After all, what does it mean to like something or hate something?
This is but a humble pastime in the practice of life, from which we can obtain the meagre and thin.
This prompts us to read one by one, to look at it, to score it, and in the end the number of this whole becomes even a ostentatious statistical basis.
Of course, such a department to read, read, score, and eventually become someone else's business.
This is the second seizure of the entertainment industry, the first seizure of our consumption of the work itself, and the second seizure of our evaluation of the work itself.
Think about what you usually see, movies, TV series, and then look at its background and analysis, and then look at its evaluation and analysis.
This, taken together, may have taken you quite a bit of time.
But it doesn ’ t matter, these contents are endless, if you want to be a “literary work critic ”, you have been born in the most prosperous era.
This shows that the art works "public has overtaken the head."
Because part of the public repression, let us pour the public brain on the likes and dislikes of literary works, which ultimately alienates our relationship with literary works.
In the new decade, the culture of all these reviews will become more and more intense.
But thankfully, this is a culture of our preferences and choices that we can freely abandon.
Comments
0
No comments here
Why not start the discussion?

Wells to contemporary voices, including those from underrepresented demographics.

Title:

Content: 16 / 05 / 2023 - 18: 00
Why does the age of machine learning need the humanities?
We still need traditional human skills: we need to scrutinize assumptions and evaluate arguments; however, the challenges facing 21st century citizens are not always individual arguments that need individual assessment, but are overwhelmed with information such as the Hader Falls.
(Getty)
It is no longer easy to live our normal lives these days, as we are asked to be wary of digital robots and biased search engines, but the uncertainty associated with the new media can make us easy prey to old forms of political propaganda, and we have all seen how Donald Trump avoids criticism by adopting the same style of skepticism and uncertainty, claiming that most news sources are “fake ” and Google searches. A lizard against him.
If democracy ’ s success depends on well-informed citizens, democracy is in trouble.
This is a moment of crisis for many institutions, including higher education, especially in disciplines such as English, philosophy and history, which promise to prepare students to be citizens, but to prepare students for a world in which information is filtered by computers, we will need a stronger alliance between the humanities and mathematics. These are the ideas that shape our world, and the mathematical critique of cultural models.
We still need traditional human skills: we need to scrutinize assumptions and evaluate arguments; but the challenges facing 21st century citizens are not always individual arguments that need to be evaluated individually; rather, we are overwhelmed with information such as the Hader Falls, coming from data in our networks of friends, and in statistical models that predict our preferences.
Evaluating individual sources won ’ t help us know how biased that information is.
Now we need to think about samples and models, that is, we need to think about the mathematics behind the information.
We may have learned before that mathematics is defined as specialized scientific performance, but culture and politics in the 21st century are increasingly intertwined with automated forms of statistical inference called machine learning, and students who do not understand it will struggle to understand what happens to them in their living lives.
It is equally easy to misunderstand machine learning, as many popular books and articles on the subject encourage discussion about the dangers of algorithms, which are no longer the most appropriate topic for discussion in this age, where the algorithm is defined as a recipe, a series of steps to solve a problem: separate the fallout from the yardstick and screw it up.
Algorithm became a popular and influential term in the 20th century following the widespread idea that computers do not work unless instructed by humans.
Journalists use the word every time computers are used to do something, which may be technically correct, but the computerized innovations that have reshaped our daily lives in recent decades should not be understood as a mere mass of new algorithms, as we have moved to a system in which computers are inconspicuously controlled.
We no longer write directly the algorithms that govern computer decisions, but ask the computer itself to write its instructions by modeling the problems it is asked to solve.
Take the filtering of random (or insignificant or unwanted) emails, for example, which is a task whose terms cannot be defined precisely, because they reach us in different forms, and it is difficult to write a single algorithm to block them all, and the other solution, the most innovative, in dealing with them, is to collect a large amount of messages rejected by human readers, together with the messages. We then ask the computer to come up with the blocking instructions by observing and inferring the difference between the two groups.
A computer may list common words in spam (“free, ”“ offer, ” and “cialis ”), and then measure the relative probability of their presence in accepted and rejected messages.
This leads to a “statistical model ” of the concept of spam, which can be used to filter incoming messages.
Unlike the way an algorithm works, which will exclude any message that contains words such as “free ” and“ display ”, even if it is an important or ordinary message, the statistical model takes into account a number of different clues, indicators, and ambiguous clues to assess the likelihood of a message being considered “random. ”
This approach, known as machine learning, requires the computer to understand the ambiguous patterns contained in messages as a whole, rather than giving them explicit instructions directly, and the aforementioned patterns are problematic in part because the computer often learns from human behavior, which in turn does not follow strict mathematical rules. Mathematical understanding of the learning process.
When children try to learn, they tend to generalize based on specific examples such as considering a cat as a cat or animal, and this requires children to conclude based on the details available to them, because the animals are not always as colorful as a cat, and do not make sounds like it, and so on.
Perhaps we do not realize that learning requires inference, because forgetting details is part of the nature of humans, while computers do not suffer from the same state, where they reach the details easily and easily, so we must tell them frankly and clearly to work to limit the long list of emails (or animals) in a useful vague model.
The success of machine learning depends on the collection and accounting of data, and “learning ” in the words of statisticians is the next step.
Machine learning is increasingly shaping human culture: based on the voices we make, the TV series we watch, and what we write on Facebook, all become food for models of human behavior, which in turn shape what we see on the Internet.
Because this course can amplify existing biases, any critique of contemporary culture must include a critique of machine learning.
But to prepare students for this new world, we need to take action and offer them more than just a warning that algorithms are causing problems.
Generalizing a culture of uncertainty doesn ’ t necessarily help people understand the media, as we saw in the former president ’ s attacks on biased search engines and fake news.
Telling students that new technologies are designed to trick them into looking for quick fixes (Dana Boyd argued in an article that trying to teach people practices that allow them to access, critically evaluate, and understand the media is likely to backfire).
To be a healthy precaution, without descending into obsession and distrust, students need to understand both the limits of technology and its legitimate forms of application, and humanities researchers can contribute to both parts of this educational project, because we already know one of the central applications of machine learning: modeling ambiguous and implicit patterns in human behavior. Humanities.
The above claim may seem strange, as we have always believed that mathematics has no place in history and literature, but the researchers of the humanities have been more flexible than the stereotypical image of them suggests in their hatred of the natural sciences. In the 20th century it was not able to offer anything to culture.
We can ’ t, for example, write a simple algorithm to help us identify the literary genre, because literary genres lack a judicious, descriptive definition.
Humanities scholars have painstakingly come to humility in this particular field, with dozens of them spending their lives trying to define the genre of “science fiction, ” until critics finally admit that a genre means different things at different times.
Reluctantly, scientists have abandoned their search for a single feature that brings together species, embracing the idea that species carry a family resemblance, and their content changes from decade to decade.
Concepts of this kind may seem slippery and unscientific, as does machine learning, which we resorted to in the first place because we could not come up with a simple and comprehensive definition of random mail, relying on human knowledge embedded in their rejection of certain messages for a variety of reasons.
A model based on this type of evidence will never be stable.
It will have to be updated every few years, as old forms of fraud disappear and new ones emerge.
My point is that the warning against biased algorithms denies and repudiates the true limits of machine learning, which go beyond carrying an accidental bias.
Models formed from examples of human behavior are necessarily models of a specific cultural context.
Machine learning models cannot offer us objective, out-of-date models, because human culture is fickle.
This means that helping students understand the strengths and limitations of historical knowledge can be a way to help them understand the strengths and limitations of machine learning.
There is much in common between the vague and context-specific models produced by machine learning and the familial similarity that historians see in culture (for example, both models tend to be determined by many overlapping clues, rather than by one fundamental feature).
It is not surprising, then, that the field of cultural history benefits from machine learning.
Catherine Boddy ’ s A World of Fiction compares different models to illustrate how Australian and American writers diverged from the 19th-century British writing tradition, and Andrew Piper ’ s Catalogues uses these methods to elicit insights into the attraction of introverted heroines in literary works to windows.
Students generally don ’ t need to study the examples identified above, but each of them will need some hands-on experience on the statistical models that have become central to our modern culture.
The general student population does not need to understand that these models are constrained by the same contextual conditions that make historians and literary critics so cautious.
Technology leaders who argue that machine learning is more objective than other forms of knowledge cannot be trusted.
But we must be deeply suspicious of political leaders who use the theoretical complexity of the Internet to indicate that real knowledge is impossible, that everything is false, and that the only solution is to make decisions based on personal and individual biases, without taking into account the real evidence and the general perspective of any issue.
It is possible to form and build real knowledge by comparing different cultural contexts, and this method has been adopted by recent scholars for a long time.
We need the same comparative strategies to understand our lives as our knowledge of the present is increasingly filtered through statistical models that target specific target markets, and we need to recognize that the traditions of caution and relativism that historians use in their work are not alien to the new computer world.
Such bridges between the humanities and natural sciences will soon have value, and universities have not yet explained them to their students, but as usual try to accommodate technology-related cultural changes in pre-existing academic disciplines.
The discipline of “digital humanities ” often turns easily into an area of internal conflict between history and English departments, and is more associated with teachers than with students.
Students need to find an alliance between disciplines, without any of them losing their separate identity.
Students learn how to use machine learning from quantitative disciplines, such as information science or the new interdisciplinary data science.
They may turn to the humanities in order to apply new methods to cultural questions, or to think about the historical and social implications of these methods.
The new links between disciplines will not replace the traditional strengths of history, philosophy, art and literature, but we will see a significant shift if we see humanities and natural scientists working on a joint educational project.
Throughout the 20th century, these sections of the university assumed antagonism with each other.
Natural science teaches you how to clone a T. rex, as one of the satirical images put it.
And the humanities give you reasons not to.
These examples of antagonism are clever and funny stories, but we have to move beyond them.
The beast in our world is not a dinosaur that we can avoid creating, but a human history that is already disjointed, predatory, and difficult to predict, and we will need, to understand ourselves, both numbers and words.
Humanities researchers have a lot to contribute to this field, because we know the past of this beast, and we know its slippages, knowing the superiority of any other discipline.
We always cast constructive doubt on the numbers, and we can do more than that.
We can work hand in hand with natural science researchers to show students that statistical inference and historical interpretation are two parts that are allied and intertwined in order to understand life.

Title:

Content: Maggie Nelson interview: ‘Women are dying. Arguing over terms won’t save them’

The pioneering cultural critic discusses gender wars, ‘shocking’ writers, and a new Royal Court staging of her work

Bluets, a beguiling work of prose poetry in celebration of the colour blue, might not be the most obvious choice for the stage. But, as adapted by the playwright Margaret Perry, the 2009 book by the American writer and critic Maggie Nelson is appearing at London’s Royal Court Theatre.

Nelson is no stranger to performance herself. She cut her teeth on the avant-garde poetry scene, reading her work aloud in crowded bars. But in this instance, she says she was happy to leave everything in the “very capable hands” of the director Katie Mitchell and actors Emma D’Arcy, Kayla Meikle and Ben Whishaw. Nelson has seen the script a couple of times, initially to approve the project, and then to make some notes – but that’s it. She’s just as intrigued as the rest of us to see the result.

As my description of Bluets might suggest, Nelson’s books are hard to categorise. She combines elements of memoir with cultural criticism, philosophical thought and prose poetry. It’s a cocktail that doesn’t readily lend itself to either stage or screen adaptation.

Jane: A Murder (2005), for instance, takes as its subject the death of Nelson’s maternal aunt, who was killed in 1969 while a first-year law student at the University of Michigan. Nelson, who was born in 1973, never met Jane, but like the rest of the family, she was haunted by her absence. The book is something of a literary collage, bringing together a miscellany of material, from documentary sources to extracts from Jane’s own diary, even accounts of Nelson’s own dreams. Her follow-up, The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial (2007), takes the shape of more orthodox reportage – recounting the trial of Jane’s killer, 35 years after the murder, which Nelson and her mother attended – yet Nelson braids this first-person narrative with interrogations of the ethics and aesthetics involved.

Published years before the more recent explosion in “true crime”, one can imagine a Netflix producer today eagerly picking up these books, looking for inspiration for their next hit series, only to find themselves reading something entirely unexpected – “a bunch of weird philosophical and personal things about me”, as Nelson puts it. She was ahead of the curve both in terms of contributing to the genre, and to its critique: “The question of how and why we want to look at harmed women.”

We’re speaking via Zoom. It’s early morning in Los Angeles, where Nelson is in her study at home, but it’s 5pm in London. “How was the day?” she asks me. “Tell me what I’m to expect, now you’re at the end of it.” Her warmth takes me slightly by surprise. It isn’t that I thought she would be unfriendly; more that her writing displays a roving and voracious intellect that can leave you humbled. See her new book, Like Love: Essays and Conversations, which contains pieces that have been gleaned from the past two decades of her writing life.

“A long time ago, I decided that I wasn’t particularly interested in being an arbiter in the cultural realm,” she says, distancing herself from the more mainstream reviewing beat. “I was more interested in bringing my powers of attention to work that I thought was really worthwhile, and that I thought was worth having more people look at. Not that you’re blowing sunshine. It’s more that it has to move you. You have to want to say something about it.”

The gut reaction that initially draws Nelson to the subject in question – be it a piece of art, a novel, or an artist’s wider vision – is never entirely filtered out. “Generous” is the word that springs to mind when I think of how best to describe her critical voice. To read Like Love is to watch her circling issues of gender and sexuality, but refracted through a variety of different prisms, so that the end result is a constellation of ideas that seem to be expanding outwards.

Although every piece has been previously published elsewhere, I suspect much here will be new for readers, since it’s only in the past decade that Nelson’s work has found a more mainstream readership, especially in Britain. Her breakout title was The Argonauts (2015). A memoir about queer family-making, it documented and drew on her experience of IVF treatments, pregnancy and early motherhood, while her spouse, the fluidly gendered artist Harry Dodge, underwent bodily transformations of his own in the form of top surgery and testosterone injections.

In America, The Argonauts was a New York Times bestseller, and won the National Book Critics Circle Award, while here in Britain, it was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. It won Nelson praise across the board for both the dexterity of her critical thought, and for what many readers described as the bravery of her candid writing about sex, love and desire.

But the latter is something against which she pushes back, and strongly. “I’ve been in the business since I was 15 years old. Standing up and talking about sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. It’s not a new rodeo for me. I was more like, ‘Welcome to the party!’, not ‘Here I come!’”

As far as Nelson is concerned, the issue is one of expectation and conventionality. “For people who don’t necessarily read what [her friend the artist and poet] Wayne Koestenbaum calls ‘philosophically smeared literature about the body’ – which is what I generally perceive myself as having been involved with for the past 30-plus years – this may come as a shock or a revelation, or I may seem brave. But this wasn’t something new to me.”

As she’s keen to remind me, there’s a whole canon of this work out there, and they’re the writers and artists who’ve shaped her thinking. Like Love is bookended by interviews with two of the most important: the aforementioned Koestenbaum, and the poet Eileen Myles. But it’s also a subject on which Nelson touches in an essay about the work of the French writer Hervé Guibert, a pioneer of autofiction who wrote about the ravages of Aids. “People read him,” she says, “and they say, ‘Wow! You really wrote to shock the bourgeoisie!’ No – he’s telling you about a culture that’s his life. You think it’s this other thing because that’s the only way you can see it.”

One might argue that a similar tunnel vision lies at the heart of today’s fraught discussions of sexuality and gender. The Argonauts tackled questions about identity, change and the embodied experience, so I’m keen to hear Nelson’s thoughts on the divisions in current feminist thinking. She’s thoughtful in her response, refusing, it seems, to get drawn into discussions of individuals who’ve been described as gender-critical feminists – perhaps because her outlook is surprisingly optimistic. Nor, she argues, are such conflicts new. The specifics might be different, but the feminist movement has always been beset by divergent opinion.

“The good thing about being a student of feminist history is that you’re aware that there’s a long history of problematics around who’s included, whether regarding the category of woman, or who has had access to the movement.”

Someone she does mention by name, though, is the gender-studies scholar and activist Judith Butler, whose book Gender Trouble (1990) was a touchstone of third-wave feminism, redefining the ways in which people thought about sex and gender. Earlier this year, Butler sallied back into the fray with a follow-up volume, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, an impassioned polemic about the ways in which today’s gender wars are fuelling reactionary politics.

Nelson says she has been struck by the book’s reflections, in particular on gender-critical feminism. Butler refrains from saying, as some opponents do, that it isn’t a form of feminism at all; instead, the philosopher suggests that it “shouldn’t” be one. “Put most generously,” Nelson explains, “what I hear in [Butler’s] statement is a call to come together and think about what the movement should be. And if it’s about dignity, human rights, reduced violence, and ways of moving around the world that afford everyone a measure of acceptance, safety and belonging, then I see a lot of possibilities for solidarity.”

It’s easy, she continues, to point out what’s not working, or things we don’t like, or why and what we hate about each other. It’s much harder to think about what we want the world to be, and to actually think through how we might work together to make this happen. This, she says, is why she admires Butler’s work so much.

“There are many good-faith conversations to be had, and always will need to be had, about feminism and the category of woman, about identity, ontology and biology. But look, here in America we lost [the longstanding pro-abortion-rights judgment] Roe v Wade. Women are bleeding out. They’re dying. Arguing about the terms that are used in a hospital is not saving people, and that’s something we all need to agree upon. And the same forces that have made that come to pass are the ones who are transphobic.”

She interrupts herself, apologising for getting on her soapbox, but her passion is evident. “It’s not notional. It’s real, and it’s actual. It’s a very urgent time.”

Like Love: Essays and Conversations (Fern, £20) is published on Thursday. Bluets is at the Royal Court Theatre, London SW1, until June 29; royalcourttheatre.com

License this content

#### Early Influences and Development
The genre of science fiction began to take shape in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Title:

Content: Sunday 24 September 2023
Chairman of the Board of Directors and Editors
Abdurrahim Ali
Editor-in-Chief
Dalia Abdul Rahim
Chairman of the Board of Directors and Editorial Board
Abdurrahim Ali
Editor-in-Chief
Dalia Abdul Rahim
In Arabic
Le Dialogue in Arabic
Alexander Del Val writes, “The System of the World. ”
The Westphalian and Differential Realism of Henry Kissinger
Follow the latest news through the app
In his book The World Order, published in 2016 and republished in 2023, Henry Kissinger, who is over 100 years old and predicts a multipolar world based on the Westphalian equilibrium model, explains that the system created by Western countries in 1945-50 does not evoke a “consensus ” especially within the“ Global South ” and the non-Western world in general, not just between outright enemies of the United States and the West.
For the strategist and diplomat, the concepts of democracy, human rights or even international law lead to divergent interpretations within different countries and civilizations, so much so that parties to conflict regularly cite them as slogans in their mutual conflicts.
It assesses a quarter-century of political and economic crises (seen in the Global South as the fruit of Westerners) and highlights the collapse of liberalism.
This, in fact, is a Western-centric international order in favor of a chaotic regional logic that would fully question the optimistic assumptions of the early years of the post-Cold War era.
While he believes in the exact opposite view of Fukuyama ’ s thesis of “the end of history ” and the shared triumph of democracy and economic free trade, Kissinger asserts that the rise of democracy and market economy did not automatically generate a just, peaceful and integrated world and that, on the contrary,“ we have seen a clear push in several regions of the world in the opposite direction, which sought to build barricades against the policies of the advanced West, including certain aspects. ” “Globalization – which is criticized for leading to crises. ”
This idea — the common thread of this article — was developed over decades by the American diplomat who, since 2014, has also applied it to the terrible Ukrainian conflict, in large part because of his “perfect drift, ” especially since he was a proponent of intervention in American foreign policy, in the sense that he is completely opposed to the Westphalian equilibrium model he has long championed as the subject of his PhD thesis.
Kissinger notes today that “the world ’ s political and economic organizations are at odds with each other ” and is coupled with another observation that“ the international economic system has become planetary, but the structure of world politics still depends on the nation-state. ”
According to him, peace always requires acceptance of the fact that “sooner or later, any international system must be confronted with the result of two trends that damage its cohesion: a redefinition of legitimacy or a major adjustment in the balance of power.
In some cases, the system collapses because one of its core elements ceases to function or disappears, which is what happened to the communist international system at the end of the 20th century with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
In other cases, he continues, “the rising power may reject the role assigned to it by a system it did not design, and the existing powers may be unable to find a balance for this system in a way that takes into account its rise.
In fact, the emergence of Germany posed a similar challenge to the order of Europe in the 20th century, leading to two disastrous wars from which the continent has not yet fully recovered.
The growing importance of China poses a similar structural problem for the 21st century.
At the end of his presentation, Kissinger applies his theory to the looming conflict between, on the one hand, the United States and its allies, who do not want to question the international order they put in place after that date and the disappearance of the former Soviet Union, and, on the other, the reactionary neo-imperialist unionist Russia-Putinism.
And also the “rising power, ” China ’ s Xi Jinping, which, unlike Russia, has the political power and military, economic, trade, financial and technological means to ultimately challenge the Western-American order that will be hidden behind the existing liberal international order.
According to his wise and forward-looking conclusion, which is in fact a recipe for “Westphalian ” peace and balance and to avoid a clash between emerging and emerging powers, Kissinger asserts that“ striking a balance between the two elements of the system — power and legitimacy — is the best solution ” and the true foundation of the arts of government.
Power calculations that do not contain a moral dimension will turn any disagreement into confrontation, ambition will not subside, and some countries may be forced to engage in unlikely and far-fetched assessments because of the ever-changing balance of power.
On the other hand, moral prohibitions without concern for balance lead to crusades or impotent policies that call for numerous provocations.
Kissinger ’ s vision of a dual balance (the legitimacy of power and non-interference between sovereign states) is implicit in this passage of his book: “The universal significance of the Westphalian system was due to its procedural nature — that is, its value neutral.
Its rules were within the reach of any country: non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, inviolability of borders, national sovereignty, and promotion of international law.
In fact, the Peace of Westphalia embodied the judgment of reality, especially the realities of power and territory, within the framework of the concept of a secular system that replaces the principles of religion.
This vision of balance and the relative realism of international relations and geopolitical and geocultural models was shared in France by the general and strategist Pierre Marie Galois, to whom this work was dedicated, and who was Kissinger's privileged interlocutor and friend.
Unfortunately, these two realists and pessimists, such as Benjamin Barber and Graham Allison — who also observed the rebellion of the nations and civilizations of the South and the multipolar Eurasia of China and Russia — against the United States and the “global West. ”
These two experts were also less contradictory than idealists, especially regarding the risk of a return to intense wars in Eurasia and Europe due to the “meddling ” America and the“ moral ” EU ’ s inability to think about international relations.
This is in a way different from the universal democratic principle of interventionist politics and is ultimately considered hypocritical, because it often conceals a form of new epistemological imperialism within which it conceals a form of new epistemological imperialism of a combative and hostile scope.
Information about the author:
Alexander Del Val.
French writer, journalist and political analyst.
Editor-in-Chief of the Atlántico website.
His areas of interest were Islamic extremism, new geopolitical threats, civilizational conflicts, terrorism, Mediterranean issues and international relations.
Here, he breaks down Henry Kissinger ’ s ideas in his book The Order of the World.

What time period produced science fiction works that included idealogies such as capitalism, and communism, and also threats of nuclear power, racism, pollution, and more?

What time period produced science fiction works that included idealogies such as capitalism, and communism, and also threats of nuclear power, racism, pollution, and more?

Pioneering authors such as Jules Verne and H.

Title:

Content: I'm sorry.
Mayassa Sultan Al Suwaidi
Reading books charges us with knowledge and drives us to think, we read over and over again, even without knowledge, in search of a mind more original than our own, and intellectuals know that culture is a matter of direction, to be an intellectual does not mean that you have read all the books, but to have the ability to find your way in a book you may not be supposed to read in full. Follow what we say and do.
Franz Kafka, the great dark writer, wrote in a letter to his friend Oscar Pollack (1904), “One should read only those books that preach and shame him; if the book we read does not wake us up with a bang on our skull, then why do we read the book?
Oh, my gosh.
We ’ d be happy even if we didn ’ t have books. ”
The true culture tends to absorb the whole and not just accumulate knowledge and detailed information, and we may be passionate about reading books but we may feel guilty for not being able to read everything we want, time and worries and distractions around us may take up most of our time, and I believe that reading in its traditional form, which is considered a kind of veneration is about to disappear, many have turned to electronic reading media that appeal to the youth more. The tendency to read abstracts that abbreviate books in a way that may compromise their quality sometimes.
Moreover, the very process of reading, even if we spend our whole lives in it, will remain open to an infinite horizon, given all the books we will be forever ignorant of.
Whenever I felt cold or distant from reading, I addressed one of the books that reviewed the importance and necessity of reading in order to sharpen my motivation, and return to drowning in the pages of books, and during my search I was intercepted by the provocative and unconventional title of a different book entitled “How to talk about a book you have not read? ”
By French writer Pierre Bayard, translated into Arabic by Ghassan Lotfi, and the title of the book itself is enough to raise more questions, so why should we talk about books we have not read?
What is the need for false pretenses to read?
But I immediately thought of many models that claim knowledge and deceive others and claim to read many books to add some kind of cultural dignity to their social image, while their reading may be limited to reading indexes and linking the contents to the general context of the subject.
Or maybe they just read limited abstracts or heard a casual discussion about a book and not being familiar with the book did not prevent them from sharing their ideas, for example a librarian who does not read the content of books in his library but is interested in indexes, titles and classifications that are just lists that have nothing to do with the content of the real book.
Discover the creative self
The author of the book Pierre Bayard, professor of literature at the University of Paris and psychoanalyst, and has many controversial books in which he embodies his unique vision of things, a man navigating in reading and literature and a writer at the same time, how to bother to write a book in which he advises not to overread, but he calls not to read originally, where the writer to abandon the idea of sanctifying books, and demolishes some beliefs related to talk about adventure It invites us not to feel guilty for not reading all the books in our libraries, and even more so it invites us to talk about those books that we have not read in the first place, regardless of any purpose or justification, because it believes that it is an excellent opportunity to discover the creative self within each of us.
He demands the liberation of the reader from the text of the writer and the removal of the weight of the words of others from his shoulders, because in short he is looking for that power to create the text of each reader to become a writer in turn, the goal is to free the possibilities in each individual knowing that few will become writers.
And to write after you are just a reader is liberation and an act that requires a lot of courage, while excessive reading may deprive you of the possibility of being an authentic writer, because when you read only without expressing your opinion, you remain a follower of the writer, and this reminds me of the style of writing practical research and academic writing where the strength of your research lies by quoting the above to be the master of the situation. After you and your name is repeated in the list of research and references, and then you are confused between quotation and self-quotation, which is the most important and strongest in the citation, to realize after a while that this position of authority is a major factor in our talk about books, and that the simplest quotation we quote from a book is often a way to prove our argument or invalidate the argument of others.
Community Library
In his call not to overread, the writer elaborates on the idea that there is no need at all to read the book in order to have an accurate idea of its content and be able to talk about it, and explains that there is no book isolated from other books, each book is an element of a group called the collective library, which must not necessarily be known to evaluate or estimate this element specifically, and we must go beyond the individuality of the book. When you review the collection of books that you have already read and discover that you have forgotten parts of them and this is normal, does this mean that you have read the book that you forgot to read a briefing?
In order to be able to talk about books we have not read shamelessly, we must free ourselves from that tyrannical image, the image of the whole culture which the family and the school institutions have imparted to us, and which throughout our lives we seek to identify with, in vain, the truth directed to others is less important than the truth of the ego, which is only reached by the liberation from the yoke of necessity that compels us to appear to people as a culture. That torments us deep down and prevents us from remaining who we really are, ” he asserts that reading is a rubber term with no clear, explicit meaning, and explains the difference between reading and not reading and not reading.
Coexistence with books
Reading means that you spend your time with the book from cover to cover, but not reading is to recognize the idea of   the writer without the need to read the book in full, and your reading is limited to enough extracts to be the general idea of   the subject of the book, or maybe depend on what you read for the same writer previously, while not reading is different from the two types of the previous to move away from interest in reading in general.
Pierre Bayard warns in his book from falling into the trap of drowning in the books of others, the writer is a simple man who exercises his authority in the flow of ideas and feelings, and may not be completely neutral, but writes because he wishes to express his opinion and idea even if he is not familiar with the whole subject he writes about, and is not better than the reader in any way, he only possessed the tools that made him able to write his vision and experience and science, Prisoners of the text and we have the decision to accept this flow of thought, analyze it, and perhaps reject it.
The writer aims to push the reader to live with books instead of reading them, and enjoy the literary text, any book related to the general context and the previously written books on the same subject, and the use of books, in the words of Umberto Eco, to live with a book, and means to take it as a companion to socialize and learn from it no more.
To live with the book also means not to let the book prevent you from disclosing what is inside you and expressing yourself and seeking inspiration within yourself, it is important to practice freedom of opinion and approach between books while lifting the prohibitions if any.
Betrayal of Memory
One of the fundamental questions in Pierre Bayard ’ s book is: Do books that have already been read and fallen out of our memory still count in the list of books read?
The act of reading whatever it is associated with the acquisition of knowledge, but forgetting is possible, and indeed certain, in spite of us.
Personally, more than once you found me browsing through a book and finding a comment on one of the footnotes of the book or notes in my handwriting that prove my passing one day, but I do not remember who wrote anything at all at that moment!
So we have to ask an important question, how is this forgotten book different from any other book that we haven ’ t read in the first place?
Is there a perfect way to read?
Many questions have been discussed by writers such as Harold Bloom ’ s How to Read and Why?, Alberto Manguel ’ s History of Reading, Reading Memory, Reading Diaries, Daniel Banack ’ s The Pleasure of Reading, Henry Miller ’ s Books in My Life, and many others, each with their own style, method, and reasons for reading.
Many of them have been advised to follow effective reading techniques such as taking notes and perhaps abstracts about books, in addition to the importance of writing your personal opinion, your impression of the writer and the subject, translation if any, in addition to sharing with other readers and those interested in learning more.
All of this leads us to the most important question: what is culture?
Does it resemble the stereotype imposed by family and school institutions, with which we always and in vain seek to identify ourselves?
The subject is thorny and large and this article may not be enough to talk about it, but it is necessary to work to desecrate books and evoke the real self in everything we read without the need to pretend or resemble the usual stereotype, and most importantly not to fabricate culture and remain who we really are and continue to stroll between books and pick the most beautiful fruits, and that reading for fun is the most important thing that books can give us Reading books that we haven ’ t read is the beginning of creative creativity.

G.

Wells laid the groundwork for what would become a rich and diverse literary field.

Title:

Content: Alien Trek: Don ’ t forget the original intention of being curious about different cultures, alternative sounds, and willing to travel out of the comfort zone.
Photo Credit: Reuters
What we want you to know is
As more and more people say that the anthropological perspective is like a “stratosphere, ” I am optimistic that it is because we have moved to more topics and reached more readers of different fields and life experiences.
As to whether it can be accepted, whether the link can be produced, whether the story is good or not, of course, it is worth judging, but at least we have sailed out, not kept in the field.
After officially embarking on anthropology, Lin Ho-li entered the Fiji Islands and the wider Pacific world, regaining his passion for hip-hop in ballet anthropology, writing about pop culture phenomena such as music, movies, sports and, of course, his favorite Pacific.
He currently teaches at Human Resources Institute, Tsinghua University)
Travelers in the Exotherm
Agent Bale HL
I like to hear stories, but the reason is not the story itself, but the story can spread out, through the brain and heart of the path, call me into the story.
This does not need to be a monumental work, but can be achieved by a glimpse of the true stories of everyday life.
My mother is such a storyteller, good at the subject is the human tragedy, from my grandmother before the marriage across the province of love to a local Vietnamese mother to pull the child's struggle.
These are not neighborhood gossip stories, but confessions that come after close contact and reflect the possibility of how to deal with various problems in different relationships, which even my first grade son often heard with interest.
There is no moral warning, and some people of all colors, familiar or unfamiliar, have made choices because of their unique life course.
And when my experience of life overlaps with it, I imagine what I would have done if I had been in it.
In this way, other people ’ s stories become my own, and the past and the present mirror each other.
Jonathan Gottschall, author of the book “The Brain Tells Stories ”, believes that the desire for stories is an important evolutionary trait that makes humans capable of constantly projecting themselves in different situations to manipulate reactions and adjust cognition and action on the world.
Although he emphasizes fictional stories, it is a rare experience to be able to bring the stories of the real other into his own life.
The same is true of anthropology for me.
While reading classic ethnographic cases, such as the cockfighting in Bali, the shell-ornament exchange in the Tiburan Islands of the Pacific, the cattle of the Nur people in Africa and the institution of marriage, I was able to “understand ” even though it had taken place in a very remote place and depicted behavior that was unheard of before.
What I understand is not the interpretation of anthropologists and the cultural, social, and structural concepts they want to explain, but the people who appear in ethnographic materials, why they care so much about certain things, and why they create corresponding words and rituals.
I can understand why it is necessary to know the vague collective self through activities with strong sensory stimulation, and I can understand why the acquisition of precious objects should not be forced, but more carefully adhere to the rules of the game, because these are the common human experience I have or can understand.
I remember that in a class at the Institute, when discussing the ethnographic "How to Think in the Forest", which involves the ontological turn and is quite difficult to read, a classmate said that he could "understand" the different levels of communication between the indigenous people of Ecuador's rainforest and the non-human actors such as dogs, monkeys, jaguars, and even souls: Never be alone.
The word is simple, but it is so profound.
The fascination of anthropology is here, not in admiring cultural diversity, but in opening up avenues of empathy in a distant, alien world.
Become a Traveler
While it ’ s wonderful to find a connection to one ’ s own culture or personal experience when reading ethnography, most of the time, readers get lost in the tedious ethnographic material.
And when anthropologists who have long been immersed in the field, obsessed with open dialogue, subtle symbols, and multiple connections want to talk about it, the results are comparable to the murals in the Sistine Chapel.
Once upon a time, disciplines that had a close dialogue with public issues seemed to have gradually become an independent and self-indulgent secret.
But as cultural researcher James Cli  ord reminds us, the essence of anthropology is not living in a field, but traveling, moving, walking.
This action certainly has the burden of Western privilege, but it also allows privileges to be challenged, borders to be disturbed, and relationships to continue to be established because of the non-stop movement.
This kind of travel movement takes place not only in physical space, but also in the written world.
As a result, anthropologists, as travelers, have the ability to respond immediately to events of a large or small nature that are taking place in the world.
On the one hand, anthropologists have the flexibility to shift between notes, diaries, and reports in the field; on the other hand, there always seem to be traces of ubiquitous anthropologists moving around where events occur.
What Barak anthropology is, perhaps, can be explained in this way: a group of travelers willing to leave their homelands to live in a foreign culture, and then leave the field again, to move between the world and the world in an instant book, even if these new relationships bring new questions and challenges.
When I returned to Taiwan in 2011 from my field in Fiji to write my doctoral thesis, the Barbican Anthropology blog had been in operation for more than a year, but I was far from the tropical Pacific islands to keep up with the new wave of launch.
This year, Wei Desheng ’ s “Sediq Barley ” was released, which aroused widespread response from all walks of life. There are many scholars who have long been concerned about the issue of aboriginal people in the Baruch Anthropology Writers lineup, and naturally there is no absence.
The one that impressed me the most was Chiu Yun-fang ’ s “Meditation among the Bale ”, which expressed uneasiness about the complex history of many of the film ’ s plot arrangements over the sects of the Sedek.
After the article was published, there were 128 responses in the comment area below, including ethnic groups, scholars, journalists, local literary and historical workers, and readers who called themselves "ordinary small audiences". Yun Fang also responded to each message once. Although some of the comments were sharp challenges, most of them were good discussions.
As a graduate student who has just returned from a foreign cultural field and is about to embark on a lonely writing journey, I am shocked by the many interactions that Barak ’ s anthropology can cause.
In that message area, it was as if I saw a path that spread all over the place, although not every path was smooth, but at least it led to the other side. Yun Fang moved from her field of Taiwanese aboriginal “heterosexual ” culture to a popular film that was seen as sharing“ same ” knowledge, and then opened up a dialogue of a more “heterosexual ” nature.
Because of the unwritten requirement that the handler with a doctorate degree was established at the time of the founding of Baroque Anthropology, becoming a Baroque handler can be said to be one of the driving forces for me to complete my studies.
In March 2015, I completed my oral examination for my doctoral dissertation, and immediately reported the good news to the editor-in-chief Guo Peiyi, and was immediately invited to write my first ballet essay, Rap, Revolution and Islam, and officially joined the community of ballet farmers.
I have accumulated a variety of unhealthy interests in the monotonous sea of study, and I think that I have been delayed full of heroes, and finally got the stage to play.
I write passionately on topics ranging from music, movies, novels, comics, sports, to anthropological anecdotes, editorials, book reviews, and films.
It really feels like traveling in multiple worlds.
Many Baroque writers have this kind of writing experience of leaving their own fields and then traveling across borders and moving.
We have a lot of current events, which are the immediate response of the writers who are connected to major events. For example, at the end of July 2015, a student chose to end his own life in the anti-high school syllabus fine-tuning movement. Peng Renyu, who has been concerned about trauma and healing, immediately published “Healing trauma with listening and action: A speech for anti-classics students and other adults. ”
We only share the experiences of people in everyday life, but we can make a real impact by walking into the home of the reader.
I am talking about Chen Ruzhen, also included in this book "I am not your family": the knowledge of Filipino domestic helpers eating in Hong Kong ", in response to the enthusiastic comments, many readers said that they know how to get along with domestic helpers and even company employees.
We have a speech by Lin Kai-shih, who is the head of the department, urging anthropology graduates to “be a hesitant listener ”, but it can also be of great use to life.
We also have two foreign writers, Stella Rui and Shi Yongde, who are willing to leave the comfort zone and write in Chinese, which is why there is an additional language conversion path.
And in the epidemic that swept the world last year and the protest movement that spread across the world, many writers were able to jump out of their fields and provide comments from real and private daily experiences.
It can be said that these are written journeys with different vitality.
Blogging experience of course is not always good, sometimes the article will attract a sharp response, and the dedication of the work is not enough.
Blogging also has limitations on the length of words, unable to develop their arguments more fully.
In addition, the “lifespan ” of web articles is short and will soon be overshadowed by other events and comments.
However, these sacrifices would be worthwhile if more anthropological perspectives from the diaspora could be brought into public discourse.
Most importantly, co-blogging gives writers the opportunity to go out and be travelers, communicate their views more effectively, become better authors, and connect with their readers.
Travel from book to book.
There are about 70 permanent members of Barak Anthropology, and more than 140 authors who have published articles on the blog. These are mostly cultural anthropologists, but they also include archaeologists, sociologists, psychologists, geographers, historians, and others. Experts from different sources.
Yes, having a doctorate degree is indeed their common denominator, but this unwritten rule comes from the beginning of the blog, hoping that professors and researchers in the college can do more pure merit, no performance, and can not help the public to write to promote anthropology.
In the future, whenever I hear of a new doctor coming out, the editorial team will try to contact the invitation, just like I did at the time, as if invited into an intermediary ritual of changing identities.
Here you can practice putting aside the familiar language of the dissertation, introducing your research results in an easy way, or choosing to reinvent yourself and develop a different academic personality as I do.
As a result, this community is more like an organic network of people who don ’ t know each other and are filled with multiple identities.
Nevertheless, the anthropological story, which refers directly to the universal experience of mankind, does speak of certain common values: curiosity about the small things that are not captured by mainstream discourse, the repeated examination of seemingly dead phenomena, the fascination with alternative possibilities and the hope and power to challenge the status quo, and then to reflect on larger questions of organization, structure, and history.
What I want to say is that anthropology itself is a constant dialectic of “difference ” and“ same ”, but this dialogue can only continue through flight.
Therefore, if you cling to the “same ” of Baroque anthropology, you will ignore the“ different ” that comes out of the organic handwriting network and its extended care.
When the project began to hit the road, I curated the unrecorded and potentially published articles of Barak Anthropology on my blog, categorizing them according to emerging themes, including tourism, architecture, physical medicine, religious rituals, museum cultural heritage, community development, consumer economy, kinship family, sex, performing arts, cartoons, and movies. Academic institutions, musical voices, diplomacy, environmental species, languages, digital games, archaeology, diet, sports, protests, electoral politics, etc.
If the opposite ‘ stratosphere ’ refers to a vast expanse of sky beyond a single reality and experience, then travel-dynamic anthropology is always trying to leapfrog in and navigate in it, trying to find a common direction.
This is the attitude of this discipline to produce knowledge, always trying to penetrate all kinds of seams and surpass all kinds of boundaries.
When storytellers simulate and imagine possibilities in their minds, anthropologists often make it possible to travel between the field and the world, even pushing the boundaries of what can be discussed into non-human territory.
Therefore, when more and more people say that the anthropological perspective is like a “stratosphere, ” I am optimistic that it is because we have moved to more topics and reached more readers of different fields and life experiences.
As to whether it can be accepted, whether the link can be produced, whether the story is good or not, of course, it is worth judging, but at least we have sailed out, not kept in the field.
This is the original value of the Barber Anthropology blog, and the purpose of the book Alien Trek.
The book is about understanding the anthropological knowledge of this multiple world, the pandemic that has caused global change, the politics of resistance against all kinds of beasts, the sexual family that shows the possibilities of relationships, the spatial community action that knocks on the local patch, the food of the species that can eat, the sound of music that can be heard, and the clouds of self-righteousness. "Imagine that after the earth and human beings are finally reunited, a quiet manifesto poem is played out in the air," which connects these worlds with a catalog poem.
We hope that these anthropological stories from the field experiences of different writers, different corners of the world, and different scales of things are more likely to enter the lives of readers through the weight of physical books.
It ’ s certainly an unstable journey, but anthropology is willing to take this leap and tell stories that may fall on deaf ears.
We should always remind ourselves that we are curious about different cultures, alternative sounds, and are willing to leave the comfort zone to travel.
I guess that ’ s how we ’ re dealing with the “cold ”.
Lin Hao-li
On August 24, 2021, during the trip
Related book excerpts ▶ "Anthropological Trek": Offshore Wind Power Apocalypse, Creating a Friendly Sea Space for "Fishing and Fish Together"
Book Introduction
This excerpt is from "The Anthropology of Ballet 2", published by Left Bank Culture
Author: Zhao Enjie, Lin Haoli (Editor-in-Chief)
• momo online bookstore
• Readmoo Ink Reading E-book
• Enter TNL83 at Pubu E-Bookstore checkout to enjoy 83% off sitewide (excluding some items, such as physical, adult and designated items, cannot be combined with other offers)
• If you purchase the book through the links above, Key Review Network will receive a score profit from it.
29 Anthropologists 35 Field Notes on the Trek Anthropology
From different cultures to different strata, from seeing, feeling, understanding to learning
Exothermic Trek continues the usual daily nuances of Baroque anthropology, answering questions with questions.
The book is divided into seven sections.
The “Anthropology of Connecting the Athermals ” is a great complement to anthropology ’ s approach to today ’ s rapidly changing world and its analysis of a“ single path to happiness. ”
In the face of COVID-19, a topic that cannot be ignored by the world in the past two years, “In this Epidemic Time and Space ” provides valuable field notes on the epidemic of the century, starting from border epidemic prevention, distance education, mask ideology, local life support system, and Taiwan ’ s indigenous people.
"Many struggles continue" is a politics and struggle that Baruch anthropology has never missed, talking about Hong Kong, black Americans and Okinawa, Japan, and the offshore wind that is close to us, and the presidential election that we are no longer familiar with.
Anthropologists trek, return, and re-trek in the stratosphere, and share with us the bizarre, vibrant, active, and blessed.
Share the saddest, darkest, and happiest possibilities.
This is a field note that goes astray in an alien atmosphere.
From there, we imagine the possibility of reconciliation with the stratosphere.
Editor-in-Chief: Luo Yuanqi
Editor ： Weng Shihang
Tags:

What are the four eras of science fiction according to Du Jian's book?

What are the four eras of science fiction according to Du Jian's book?

What are the four eras of science fiction according to Du Jian's book?

What are the four eras of science fiction according to Du Jian's book?

What are the four eras of science fiction according to Du Jian's book?

Wells, in particular, is often credited with establishing many of the themes that would come to define science fiction, including time travel, alien invasion, and advanced technology.

Title:

Content: Essay

The Indian Anti-Colonial Movement Never Ended

It’s where we actually are in history.

By , the Raymond A. Spruance professor of international history at Stanford University.

Every historian worth their salt knows that historical and local specificities ultimately render all analogies inaccurate. Yet people navigating times of great change and uncertainty habitually seek reassurance from the past. In 1852, Karl Marx observed how revolutionaries “anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past … to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise.” By helping to legitimize major change, historical analogies have played a key role in the very making of modern history, including its ugliest episodes: The Nazis defended their camps, for instance, by pointing to British concentration camps in the South African War at the turn of the 20th century. Much of what has transpired in history has been justified by reference to some precedent.

Making new comparisons thus helps shift the paradigms and false equivalences through which we inherit the past so that we might make new history in the present. Despite their own inevitable inaccuracy, fresh analogies help uncover the darker historical truths obscured by the more flattering comparisons that enabled them. The question is not so much whether to analogize but whether the analogies we invoke serve ethical ends.

THE BACK TO THE FUTURE ISSUE: This article appears in the Summer 2022 print issue. Subscribe now for unlimited access to FP, plus the print magazine.

Every historian worth their salt knows that historical and local specificities ultimately render all analogies inaccurate. Yet people navigating times of great change and uncertainty habitually seek reassurance from the past. In 1852, Karl Marx observed how revolutionaries “anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past … to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise.” By helping to legitimize major change, historical analogies have played a key role in the very making of modern history, including its ugliest episodes: The Nazis defended their camps, for instance, by pointing to British concentration camps in the South African War at the turn of the 20th century. Much of what has transpired in history has been justified by reference to some precedent.

Making new comparisons thus helps shift the paradigms and false equivalences through which we inherit the past so that we might make new history in the present. Despite their own inevitable inaccuracy, fresh analogies help uncover the darker historical truths obscured by the more flattering comparisons that enabled them. The question is not so much whether to analogize but whether the analogies we invoke serve ethical ends.

Today, the world faces climate crisis, a pandemic, vast inequalities, war—a litany of troubles that makes our time seem unprecedented but also profoundly continuous with the past: The climate crisis is a product of the accumulated pollutants of the industrial age, and inequalities are partly the legacies of the historical processes of slavery and colonialism that were never redeemed. If our goal is to identify a propitious historical analogy that will help us cope with and overcome polluting industrialism, racist oppression, and violence, we might look to the Indian noncooperation movement that began in the 1920s—not as something done, over, in the past, but as an ongoing struggle that we might resume.

The Indian struggle for independence from British rule had begun much earlier, but tactics of nonviolent protest burst on the scene under the leadership of Mohandas Gandhi from the 1920s to 1940s. Gandhi’s approach built on earlier struggles in India and South Africa and was the product of a global intellectual history, including Jainism and Leo Tolstoy’s Christian pacifism. In a series of mass movements, protesters engaged in tax resistance, marching, and boycotting British educational institutions and British-manufactured cloth (in favor of local hand-spun cloth). Autonomy was achieved and proved through the very act of nonviolent refusal of British rule, whatever its consequences. In this sense, it was fundamentally about redemption of the self.

Among the movement’s actions that seized global attention was the Salt March of 1930, when Gandhi and dozens of followers set out on a 25-day, 240-mile march to protest the British salt monopoly and extortionate salt tax. Tens of thousands joined as Gandhi spoke to crowds along the way. On reaching Dandi on the Arabian Sea coast, Gandhi picked up a lump of salt-rich mud on the shore and declared the British law breached. Over the next several weeks, masses around the country violated the salt laws and other repressive laws. Hundreds of nonviolent protesters were beaten; more intense British violence was checked by extensive international press coverage. Gandhi was among the 60,000 arrested by the end of 1930—but the following year, the British conceded his demand to participate in negotiations about India’s future.

The British departed India in 1947, but, to many, the struggle for decolonization remained unfulfilled, as the institutions and values the British had established remained intact. In the Gandhian vision, the mere transfer of power was not decolonization, for the enemy was not the British but British civilization’s centering of material desire as the key to prosperity and progress. A regime in which white rulers were simply replaced by brown ones would also have to be resisted. It would remain, in Gandhi’s words, “foreign rule.”

This warning that the struggle for decolonization had to be permanent is the movement’s most compelling legacy for our time. It emerged from an understanding, shared by other anti-colonial groups, that liberation—in the sense of a recovery of our full humanity, not just political freedom—is something experienced in the course of common struggle. Man’s purpose, Gandhi’s contemporary the philosopher and poet Muhammad Iqbal argued, is to remake oneself ethically rather than to remake the world.

This warning that the struggle for decolonization had to be permanent is the movement’s most compelling legacy for our time.

The idea that struggle is meaningful itself, regardless of its effects, pushed back against European colonizers’ claims that history is a story of progress in which evils such as colonialism are sometimes necessary. To Gandhi, this vision of history discounted the sustaining force of love that routinely defuses would-be conflicts in a manner illegible to history. Nonviolence embraced such quotidian practices of love, creating new possibilities for the future by calling on humans to be morally accountable exclusively in the present. Insofar as it was about being ethical—and thus civilized—now, nonviolence was the end in itself, not a means to some political end. It was self-rule (“swaraj”) in the most substantive form.

“It is swaraj when we learn to rule ourselves,” Gandhi explained in 1909. “It is, therefore, in the palm of our hands.” Freedom might be attained instantly, entailing only refusal to be ruled by another. Each person would thus “become his own ruler,” he wrote in 1939; government itself would be redundant. Such utopianism was necessary to meaningful decolonization, he insisted: “To believe that what has not occurred in history will not occur at all is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man.” Straining after the ideal mattered more than arriving at it: “Let India live for this true picture, though never realizable in its completeness,” he affirmed in 1946.

For Gandhi, then, moral transformation at the level of the self, more than the departure of the British, was the movement’s real goal. It meant recovery from the values of colonialism: that material attainments (rather than ethical being) were a measure of civilization, that evil might be justified by some future vindicating effect, that society thrived through individual self-interest rather than the reciprocity of interests. Such values were incompatible with planetary habitation: “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West,” Gandhi warned in 1928. “If an entire nation of 300 millions took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”

Given these goals, Gandhian noncooperation, or satyagraha, relied on boycotts and strikes against British economic dominance and unjust laws but also everyday practices aimed at redeeming the mind and soul—walking, singing, fasting, and spinning yarn. Sacrifice, of conveniences or even life, for the sake of ethical action demanded by the present—as opposed to instrumental sacrifice in the name of some future purpose—was at its core. Satyagrahis’ willingness to endure deprivations, violent punishment, imprisonment, and even death sought to awaken the suppressed humanity of their oppressors. The point was not to punish but to open themselves up to punishment to instigate the conversion, or decolonization, of their oppressors’ minds. As Faisal Devji, a historian at the University of Oxford, recently put it, Gandhian noncooperation was “motivated by love for the opponent’s humanity, no matter how residual it might have become.”

Gandhi recognized that challenging the entrenched values of colonialism was a formidable task. Though moral transformation of the self was in the palm of one’s hand, the power of colonial educational institutions propagating instrumental views of evil and centering consumption as the key to civilization meant that it would take time for each individual to realize the need for it.

Many anti-colonial thinkers perceived that empire’s shape-shifting capacity meant permanent anti-colonial struggle, rather than a moment of decisive victory. Satyagraha—literally, insistence on truth—was necessary precisely because of the way empire was so easily normalized and obscured. Liberation would be experienced in, rather than as a result of, that unresolved struggle. Colonialism valorized “a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity,” the Martiniquan philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), but human nature is essentially intersubjective, and the very forms of collective organization necessary to anti-colonial struggle allow the colonized to recover the kinship and solidarities that are integral to lived experience: “[T]he community triumphs and … spreads its own light.”

In the wake of such anti-colonial movements and the horrors of World War II, many European philosophers, too, recognized that history was not a narrative moving in a particular direction but the unceasing flux of life through which individuals strive to redemptively transcend their humanity—a continual quarrel between ethics and circumstances that shapes the ends of each of our lives.

This is a way of living in a state of constant aspiration, aware that fulfillment of struggle lies in the struggle itself. The search for analogies with this understanding of history is not about tracing history’s direction or lamenting our failure to learn from the past; it is about grasping human capacities so that we don’t mistake our predicament as exceptional and lose sight of it as part of a continual quarrel in which our life’s meaning is at stake. The Indian anti-colonial movement is not an analogy from the past offering lessons but where we actually are in history—trying to recover our humanity in the face of state oppression and destructive materialism.

Nor is it a story about another place, and so, irrelevant to the United States. Descendants of the Indian and other anti-colonial struggles are there—U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, for one, frequently refers to his ancestors’ participation in the Gandhian movement. Moreover, early Indian anti-colonial activists drew inspiration from contemporary American anti-racist struggles. And precisely because the redemptive power of love is a universal value, the Gandhian movement’s ideas and tactics also watered American struggles. Black civil rights leaders met with Gandhi in the 1930s, and Gandhian tactics profoundly influenced the postwar civil rights struggle led by Martin Luther King Jr. and the anti-war and pro-environment movements that followed—whose descendants are among us, too. These movements are all ours. The collective heritage of global struggles against oppression is an American strength.

The past is not a series of self-contained moments behind us—pearls that we might squint at to find a reflection of our times—but something everlasting in the way it structures the world we inhabit. It’s time to join the salt march, to go beyond single-day rallies and endure the deprivations needed to seriously confront the military-industrial structures causing existential climate crisis and rampant violence. As Americans despair at their political institutions’ failure to alleviate the epidemic of mass shootings, it’s time to ask: What would happen if, during the school year, teachers launched a monthlong march to their state capitols to demand gun regulations and Americans joined in their thousands along the way?

Priya Satia is the Raymond A. Spruance professor of international history at Stanford University and the award-winning author of Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East and Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution. Her most recent book is Time’s Monster: How History Makes History.

More from Foreign Policy

Why Do People Hate Realism So Much?

The school of thought doesn’t explain everything—but its proponents foresaw the potential for conflict over Ukraine long before it erupted.

China’s Crisis of Confidence

What if, instead of being a competitor, China can no longer afford to compete at all?

Why This Global Economic Crisis Is Different

This is the first time since World War II that there may be no cooperative way out.

China Is Hardening Itself for Economic War

Beijing is trying to close economic vulnerabilities out of fear of U.S. containment.

His works, such as "The Time Machine" (1895) and "The War of the Worlds" (1898), explored the implications