Stockholm syndrome

Yesterday when I chatted with one of my friends he wanted me to help him get access to the foreign website (Some websites are banned in cn). Then I told him that I also cannot get access to those websites because the DNS server I used now was located in China. He was speechless and said I had the “Stockholm syndrome”. Actually I had never heard this before so I searched it on the Internet. I was very surprised after I read the information I found because I realized I really had this “disease”.

Stockholm syndrome was found in 1973 when four robbers broke into a bank in Stockholm and kidnaped four hostages. After the four hostages were saved six days later, they did not want to punish the robbers. On the contrary, they tried to protect the robbers. Since then, this strange mental disease was found and concentrated. The FBI’s Hostage Barricade Database System shows that roughly 27% of victims show evidence of Stockholm syndrome.

Stockholm syndrome can happen if the following four conditions are satisfied.

1.      Hostages believe that their lives are in danger.

2.      The robbers distribute grace to the victims.

3.      Hostages are separated from the rest of world. They can only get information from the robbers.

4.      Hostages believe that it is impossible to escape.

Hostages are totally dependent on the robbers, just like infants are totally dependent on their parents. Actually there are lots of similarities between infants and hostages. Some experts said Stockholm syndrome may develop from this. I agree with this and I think this is the nature of human beings. In other words, human beings are not the perfect dominators. Human beings can also be easily domesticated.

If a terrorist aim your head with a gun and told you gently “the highest right of human beings is to live”, will you be particularly feared? Will you listen to the terrorist? If the answers are “yes”, then you also have the “Stockholm syndrome”.

The translation of the Chinese poems

The translation of the Chinese poems

The topic of this week is poetry. Since my topic of my blog has never been the topic of the week, I decided to write something about poetry. And the translation of the Chinese poems is what I found interesting.

As is known to all, Chinese poems are very complex and difficult to understand, which makes us suffer a lot in Chinese classes. Anyhow, Chinese poems are the marrow of the Chinese culture. To introduce Chinese poems to foreigners, we have to let them understand these poems. Then we need someone to translate these poems into Chinese, which is very difficult since Chinese poems contain too many things with only fewer Chinese characters and it is difficult to do it with English. Moreover, it is impossible to translate some poems into English. For instance, the famous sentence written by  Li Bai: “飞湍瀑流争喧豗，砯崖转石万壑雷”，can you translate it into English with its rhyme and content? Don’t laugh; sometimes non-chinese speakers really want to figure out the meaning of this seemingly profound sentence. So the translation is very difficult.

  At the same time as chair Mao said, “the wisdom of chinese is unlimited”, there are indeed some good English poems translated form chinese. For example, can you guess the chinese version of the following English poems?

The shimmering ripples delight the eye on sunny days;
The dimming hills present a rare view in rainy haze.
West Lake may be compared to Beauty Xi Zi at her best,
It becomes her to be richly adorned or plainly dressed.

Yeah, this poem is translated from 《饮湖上初晴后雨》 by a tour guide named Chen Gang. Quite vivid, isn’t it? And here is another example:

The sun beyond the mountain glows

The Yellow River seawards flows

You can enjoy a grander sight

By climbing a greater height

It is translated from 《登鹳雀楼》 by prof. Xv Yuanchong. It is also a good translation. From these two translations, we can find something in common. The first point is that both two poems have rhymes. These rhymes not only existed at the end of the sentence, but also in the middle and sometimes in the beginning of the sentence. Another point is that they are both concise and “looked beautiful”. You will understand what I am talking after reading the following two sentences:

The greater the height，
The grander the sight.

(欲穷千里目，更上一层楼)

Men the world over，
Brothers each other.

（四海之内，皆兄弟也）

They look very concise and people are willing to read them. At the same time they sound nice. Besides, the most important point, the meaning of the translated poems should be as same as possible with the original poem. This is the fundamental requirement. Here are also some examples:

No man but dies,
My name ever shines

(人生自古谁无死，留取丹心照汗青)

A bosom friend far from here,
Brings a distant land near!

（海内存知己，天涯若比邻）

It is more to talk this time with you
Than to go to school for years in value.

（与君一席话，胜读十年书）

No matter how the forms the sentence changes, the meaning would not change. The meanings are the most important factor to a poem, so does the translation of poems. All the translations should not change the original meanings.

After reading those translations above, do you want a try? Here are more translations I found interesting. Can you figure out what is the original version of these poems?

Reduce a major issue to a minor one,

And turn a minor one to none.

Of the trying long march the Red Army makes light，
Thousands of rivers and mountains are barriers slight.

Most Chinese daughters have desire so strong
To face the powder and not powder the face.

Pay obeisance every morn, pay adoration every morn, and every morn pay the both,
Keep veg diets all together, keep ablution all together, and all together keep the both.

Sea waters tide, day-to-day tide, everyday tide and everyday ebb,
Floating clouds appear, often appear, often appear and often go.

References: Wu Weixiong. 悦耳悦目，现场见效——漫谈涉外活动诗词佳句汉英翻译的现场效果(527300)

         From www.baidu.com

an interesting finding in a boring place

Today we went to the Singapore Science Center as our second learning journey. Frankly speaking it is very boring to spend the whole afternoon among the primary school students seeing the excited kids playing those boring games. I was constantly wandering how the science center of Singapore can be so shallow. In my opinion, the science center in my hometown is much better. At least it is more likely to be intended for the adults. The science center here is totally prepared for the children and I was confused why they chose such a naïve place to let us have our learning journey. Well, stop complaining, today I found an interesting thing.

I do not know exactly where it is. It is in a corridor. I found a strange machine there. It is strange not because its shape or function for it is big case used to take photos. It is strange because what I found on the screen was an arm. Who did this? Why did he only take a photograph on his arm? I was curious about this and then I just went into the case to see what exactly happened. I did not find anything strange inside. Hence I decided to just have a try to figure it out. Maybe it is only because someone’s careless or jokes. I touched the screen to take a photograph. About ten seconds later, the computer produced an image consisted of faces. Those small ones joined together to form a big one. Not interesting at all. It must be someone who left in a hurry when the computer took photos. When I was about to leave, Chen Shuyu, a little boy who is always with me found that on another side of the case there was another screen and my photo were hanged there! I wanted to cancel the photo but I found there is no button around the screen! I had to take another photo to take its place. So I just stood outside the case with one of my arms in the case to touch the screen taking another photo. And at that time I realized why there was a photo of one’s arm before I went there…

Summary of the Dark Knight

On seeing the title of this movie, I thought in this movie there would be a lot of fights and the batman would be a hero who punish those government officers or cops who receive bribes. However, after seeing this movie, I found I was totally wrong.

Because we have watched this movie together, I won’t introduce the plots here. In general, in this movie the batman defeats the evil. There are three main characters, the batman, Joker and Harvey Dent. The batman is still the batman we are familiar with; Harvey Dent is an inspector who is a fair man seeking for justice but failed finally. Joker is an insane person who wants to find excitements form all kinds of rules-broken affairs.

It is obviously that the director’ favorite character is Joker. Compared with the batman, despite those action plots, Joker’ every word, every movement is pondered carefully. He is a person who dislikes those opinionated schemers. He just wants to break the rules and show the schemers the so-called rules are very weak. Consequently he behaved weird; he broke the rules of the mobs and then broke the rules of those government officers. Even in his last time he showed a strong desire to death, which is not our “common rule”. If all the rules you are familiar with and living on are broken, can you imagine how terrible your life will be? You would never know what you should do. You would even wonder if you should be dead or not. Can we call this the “freedom”? Joker wanted to show a real world without rules to the ridiculous public. Though finally Joker was caught by batman, in a way he was still successful. He broke rules and in Harvey Dent it turned out that human beings are ugly without the rules. Maybe my views cannot get across to you, anyhow, Joker is my favorite character and I think he is a “real” guy. Maybe I can call him a great person.

At the end, just like Alfred said in the movie, in this world there are some people who get bored of the “great rules” and want to see what the world will be if the rules are broken. What will the world look like without rules? Who knows…

how to solve the ARP attacked problems

How to solve the ARP attacked problems

    At first I must say that this is not copied. This is edited by myself.

Recently computers of boys living in RV Hostel keep being attacked by some students we do not know. They want to cut others’ nets to ensure a high speed Internet condition for them. They are very annoying. Though RV office has posted a warning to them, I do not think they will behave them because RV office cannot find them. They can change their MAC addresses as long as they want. So I will you some solutions towards this problem.

First, if your operating system is WINDOWS XP, congratulations, it would be much easier. Open your Internet Explorer 6 and find the “diagnose” in “tools”. You will find you can surf the Internet again. If you do not use IE6, you can also solve this problem by changing settings. I will told you how to change the settings in next paragraph.

Second, if your operating system is WINDOWS 7, you also need to change your settings. I will show you how to solve it step by step.

First, click the net icon in the right corner.  open network and sharing center.

Second ,

Third, double click the local connection.

Forth, click preperties.

Fifth, click configue.

Sixth, click advanced.

Seventh, click network address (or sometiomes local Administrator address)and input a sixteen hexadecimal (12 bits). Click OK finally and you will find now you can log on your QQ again.

You can also apply this to WINDOWS XP.

That is all. Actually we just change our Mac address, just like Wen Xuezhi said in his oral presentation.

God is not always fair

The day before yesterday, in a courtroom in Beijing, a twenty-year-old porter sitting in the dock kept showing his impatience. His name is Ma Jinku and he is the defendant. On the other side of the courtroom, the plaintiff was crying with deep sorrow.

On the morning of May 22th, 2011, it was a Sunday and Ma Jinku felt very sleepy. He wanted to sleep late but he was awakened by his boss to work. He was angry and then he went the kitchen, put more than twenty sleeping pills into the soup. He thought in this way his colleagues would feel uncomfortable and his boss must give them a day-off. An hour later, his colleagues felt sick and all of them went to the hospital. In the evening, when Ma wanted to go to bed, Mrs.Yin, the daughter in law of his boss, asked him to repair the broken light and take care of her baby. Ma did not want to do this so he said he would not follow her while Yin said he was only a worker and he had to do what his boss wanted him to do. Ma became angry and then they quarreled with each other. Finally the quarrel turned to a fight and Ma killed both yin and her child.

Ma is from Heilongjiang province. His parents got divorced when he was very small and he followed his father. At the age of four his father was sentenced to death because his father killed someone and then Ma was brought up by his stepmother. It was not easy. Ma was maltreated by his stepmother. All of these caused the drawback in his character.

No matter how Ma’s character Ma killed people and he is more than 20 years old. He will be sentenced to death like his father. But how can he be so inpatient in the courtroom? He said he had already been contemptuous. In the end of the court, he said: I hope you judge can sentence me to death as soon as possible.

This is the story. I do not want to deliver my comments. I just wonder how his life is. Born in a broken family and died in such a young age (he will be sentenced to death), it seems that his life was full of hatreds and pities. It is said that “people are born equal”, but Ma, born in such a family, was bound to be unequal with others. How can the god be so unfair? Or he was an angel and born to punish someone? I hate Ma, at the same time I feel sorry for him, for his pale life.

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An awful day

Last Thursday, when I got up and went to my computer to copy Chen Shuyu' document to print it out, I opened it and the title of it is "What an awful day". At that time I had not realize that my awful day began with this...

We had to print our paras out and my roommate said he can help me print it out, so I just let him print Chen Shuyu's para,too. He planed to print them as soon as we arrived at the central library. And  I waited him in my classroom. Ten minutes later he turned out at the door of the classroom with a sweaty shirt. However, he said he cannot print my para out because my para is created by WPS, not Micro Word with only Shuyu's para on his hand. He also said that he can help me change the format and I can go to the central library myself with his EZ-link card. Ninety minutes later I went to the central library with Huang Chunlin and when we arrived, we found that we cannot get into because we forgot to bring our term card. So we had to go back and planned to go there during the lunch time. After lunch, I found someone who also went there to print and give them our paras. I thought this time my printed para would be presented to me after so many times failed, but things always get worse. When they came back there was only 5 minutes left before beginning our classes and what they brought back is Huang Chunlin's para and Chen Shuyu's para! They print the wrong para! You can never know how I felt at that time exactly. Anyhow I had to hand in the paper and the only way left was to print it out at the afternoon's break. This time I asked my roommate to help me to ensure I can print it out, but it turned out to be not very right. When we got there wo found that we forgot to bring the term card again and after we fetched the card and seated in front of the computer, we cannot get access to the computer and finally after trying many times we found the USB driver did not work. We had to change a computer to do it. This time we were very "LUCKY" to print my para out successfully, in spite of the fact that we were both late for class... 

Linsanity, Again and Again AND AGAIN!

Air Canada Centre witnessed Jeremy Lin’s another overwhelming performance today. Lin’s decisive 3-point shot with 0.5 seconds to play declared Raptors the sixth Linsanity’s victim. UNBELIVABLE! His performance is persuasive in each of his latest six games. To everybody’s surprise, he sets a new NBA record in the meantime. In his first five starts, he has scored an overall 136 points. The former record was belong to O’Neal(126). More importantly, here are six consecutive wins for New York Knicks and baby Lin.

Linsanity burst out about a week ago. D’Antoni sent him on court in desperation, but Lin ended up with 25 points and 7 assists against Nets. I checked that database and shared the news with my fellow instantly simply for fun. From my perspective, it was a lucky game for him and his good luck will definitely not last for long. In the following match, which he experienced his first NBA start, his 28 points and 8 assists performance conquered Madison Square Garden for the first time. Even after his third big game against Wizards with 23 points and 10 assists, I did not give him adequate respect and I thought it was time for his crazy luck to come to an end.

Another 3 games passed, I gradually realized I was a fool.

He is a truly excellent player. In the third start in his career, he helped Knicks beat Lakers without Amar’e Stoudemire and Melo. A career high 38 points, along with 2 steals and 7 assists sank Kobe’s 34 points. All the criticisms and doubts for Lin became jokes. He has been driving people mad! People who doubted him became his fans. Korean endeavored to convince others that Lin had somewhat Korean descent. His T-shirts becomes the most welcome product. His tweeter followers increased more than 50 hundred in 3 days. The official site of New York Knicks seems to be designed for Lin. People who never concerned about NBA began googling and youtubing him. He just continuously shows how potential he is.

Maybe you cannot imagine how tough his basketball dream once was. His applies for scholarships were refused by all the Ivy League universities. He suffered endless discrimination when he took part in high school basketball league. He was undrafted. He was swept off by two NBA clubs before he received an unfixed contract. All of these only make Linsanity even more than a miracle.

After Knicks extends their winning streak to 6 games, their fans even no longer missed BD and Melo. For them, LInsanity is everything. Though, there are a lot of uncertainties in the rest of the season. Hopefully, Jeremy Lin will give us more surprises.

Let’s go, Linsanity!!

Yap-Choo Swi Neo-Su Junjin-The Orientation camp

After a one month’s study, every one of us have accustomed to the language environment of Singapore. But as for life, someone may think that the life is still boring. Considering this, the MOE and the VCF have arranged an activity named the Orientation Camp for us to help us make new friends and adapt to the lifestyle as soon as possible, the preparation of which started half a year before the activity. All of us SM3 NUS students participated in this activity and I found that it is really helpful to us.

First, the Orientation Camp helps us make new friends. We can make friends with the every “befriender”. And with so many enthusiastic “befrienders”, we all feel happy and found it easy to make friends with them, which increased our confidences to make friends with locals. It helps us make new friends not only during the activity, but also after the activity.

Second, the Orientation Camp helps us get more familiar with the university. During the activity, we go to many places inside and outside the campus. And we also use some public facilities, which we may use in our study later. It can also help us get more familiar with the people and the school life in the university, which is much more important.

In all, the Orientation Camp is helpful to us. For me, it helps me make friends not only with the “befrienders” but also with some other SM3 students and known more about the university. They are very important for me. And I believe it is also important for every student who participated in the activity. Anyhow, this is the beginning of our life in Singapore and we should really value this experience.

Yap-Choo Swi Neo-Wang Mingda-2011/12 SEASON, A TURNING POINT FOR MINNISOTA TIMBERWOLVES

Micheal Wibon, a featured columnist for ESPN, once commented “ Rubio’s creativity on the move has made the Timberwolves worth watching for the first time since Kevin Garnett left.” It is not an exaggeration. Rubio really has changed something. Target Center drew a midweek sellout, the team’s first non-opening night sellout since March 31, 2004. Along with coach Rick Adelman’s arrival, 2011/12 season will definitely be a turning point for T-wolves.

I mainly ascribe the change to Rubio. When he is on court, Timberwolves’ attacking style is totally different. The pass-first Spanish has an amazing ability to discover his teammates’ movement perfectly at any time. His pinpoint pass often leads to an opportunity to score in the end. Meanwhile, he owns a big heart already. He can shoot from distance as well. More surprisingly, his defense is also excellent. Monty Williams, the coach of Hornets, praised him that his defense had already surpassed most guards.

The statistics tell everything. With relatively few minutes on court, he contributes 8.3 assists, 2.3 steals, plus 10.7 points and 4.6 rebounds per game so far!

Adelman plays a key role, too. His experiences are quite essential for this young team. He can utilize players well, especially Rubio. Few people believed Rubio would reach double-digits in assists so often at the beginning of the season. It’s Adelman who gave him so much confidence and trust, which helped Rubio quiet all the criticism.

Once you go through the roster of T-wolves, you will find a noticeable feature that nearly half of the players were selected with rather preceding picks, like Derrick Williams(2011) with first round 2^nd pick, Micheal Beasley(2008) with first round 2^nd pick, Darko Milicic(2003) with first round 2^nd pick, Wesley Johnson(2010) with first round 4^th pick, not to mention Kevin Love and Ricky Rubio.  

It is obvious that Rubio, Love and Beasley will play an important role for Minnesota in the future. Rubio’s rookie teammate Williams and Johnson are worth expecting as well. It is also a good news for Wolves that J.J Barea has brought championship experience. Don’t forget that Wolves still have financial space to buy more players.

Though Wolves’ standing is not ideal so far, they simply need more time. They are so potential that I just can’t wait to see how well T-wolves will do in the next few years. Maybe they will become another Oklahoma City Thunder, or maybe they will do even better!