12月18日，我将去参加由惠普和微软赞助的PLOGit活动（地点，北京），谁愿意跟我一块儿去（组织者给了我5个名额）？请来信lixiaolai@gmail.com。据说到场即有礼物，参与者在活动中取胜的话，还有一台笔记本电脑赠送。

活动名称：PLOGit（PLOG意为log by professionals，it意为你感兴趣的任何领域和话题）
· 活动形式：每期邀请不同领域的意见领袖就某些主题进行演讲。
· 本期主题：Future Is（一句简单的语言，一个思想的火花，或许都可以影响这个世界的未来和趋势。而盛载着最跳跃的思想的人们在改变我们共同未来的道路上起着不可估量的作用。）
· 本期嘉宾：
o 瘾科技 – 全球最知名的电子产品博客
o http://cn.engadget.com/
o 李笑来 – （组织者写的文案中给我的“名头”有点囧，就删掉了……）
o http://www.lixiaolai.com/
o 可能吧创始人Jason Ng – 互联网文化观察的顶尖名博
o http://www.kenengba.com
o 顾迅 – 营销专家，“基于生意的品牌管理”创始人
o http://www.brandmarketing.com.cn/
o 文怡 – 新浪生活美食的明星博客，CCTV/BTV美食栏目主持人
o http://blog.sina.com.cn/wenyi
o 包小姐 – 靓包博客一直引领时尚手袋风潮
o http://blog.sina.com.cn/purseblog
o 杨孝文 – 科普名博，新浪科技博客第三名
o http://blog.sina.com.cn/yangxiaowen0822
· 活动地点：1949 The Hidden City，北京
o http://www.elite-concepts.com/Promotions/1949/TheHiddenCity.htm

刚刚算了一下，刚刚过去的24小时之内，我整理了差不多1万2千字。

english-in-use.com

这是有生以来第一次大年三十没有被鞭炮声吵到——我在香港。很安静，真好。

一如既往，我不看春晚。早上起来，阅读器里看到月光博客里说百度在央视做广告了，心想，唉，这就叫有钱能使鬼推磨。

早晨醒来，看到一朋友昨天来短信说，“今天是你本命年的最后一天……”——谢谢他。但我不信这个，谁爱信谁信去。

我总觉得过年这事儿很荒唐——许多人好像相信旧的一年结束了新的一年开始了，就什么事儿都跟着结束前生而后又轮回重生了一样，并且相信新的轮回必然是更好的一个。一厢情愿啊。

没有什么结束了，都依然在继续——不会因为大多数人都在休息，时间和事情就因此停滞；没有什么会自动变好（尽管牛奶放久了会自动变坏）——到2010年春运的时候（以及之后的许多年里），火车票还是会那么难买，甚至可能在再次涨价之后也同样难买依旧；每年过年的时候全国上下总是会有很多人可能会因燃放炮仗而被炸瞎眼睛轰聋耳膜弄断手指甚至一命呜呼。

我身边很多人对我不过年表示不理解。其实，所谓过节很大程度上就是个体靠自我催眠参与集体自我催眠而已。其实，但凡能够做到一点点独立就会知道，如果想过节，那天天都可以是节日，为什么偏要选择车票难买日子紧张环境吵闹的时候作为节日呢？但，这是我自己的事儿，说出来而已——实际上我并不觉得像我这样在节日工作特别地有趣，工作就是挺好玩的，什么时候都挺好玩。

16岁开始，到现在也20年了，我总觉得我比身边的一些人至少每年多活十多天，仅因为不选择过年而选择该干嘛干嘛。不知道多读了多少书，多看了多少电影，多做了多少事儿。能该干嘛就干嘛——真好。

对于那些不得不过年的朋友，我的建议是，多吃多睡，少活动。平时也挺累的，趁着这时候多休息，算是补偿。其实，很多的时候“玩”比工作累多了——不是么？

整整两年前，我下决心把做网站必需的技能全部学会（其实，我只需要做“内容型”网站）。这两天检查了一下这两年的时间表与任务记录，发现自己真的已经走了很远：

• HTML
• HTML DOM
• XML
• CSS
• JAVASCRIPT
• PHP
• MYSQL
• LINUX(UBUNTU)
• APACHE
• IIS
• WORDPRESS
• DOKUWIKI
• MEDIAWIKI

把W3Schools当作起点，加上十几本书，再加上不知道多少网站和无数次GOOGLE……很多的时候，并不一定要学到“顶级专家”的，但起码要够用。只要够用，就可以用，而在用的过程中，还是会不断进步的。

前两天还在说，几乎任何一种技能“在习得的那一瞬间，整个世界都会为之而变”。这两天我被巨大的快乐包围——每到极致，就想起来艾尔帕西诺在《Carlito’s Way》（1993）中的台词，想像他一样呐喊：

I am free at last, free at last — thank God Almighty, I am free at last!

两年真的不算长。

想起来有一篇文章一直以来就是我的路灯，转载如下(原文地址，中文版：郭晓刚 译本|徐侑 译本）：

Why is everyone in such a rush?

Walk into any bookstore, and you’ll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 7 Days alongside endless variations offering to teach Visual Basic, Windows, the Internet, and so on in a few days or hours. I did the following power search at href=”http://www.amazon.com”>Amazon.com:

• pubdate: after 1992 and title: days and
• (title: learn or title: teach yourself)

and got back 248 hits. The first 78 were computer books (number 79 Learn Bengali in 30 days). I replaced “days” with “hours” and got remarkably similar results: 253 more books, with 77 computer books followed by Teach Yourself Grammar and Style in 24 Hours at number 78. Out of the top 200 total, 96% were computer books.

The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about computers, or that computers are somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else. There are no books on how to learn Beethoven, or Quantum Physics, or even Dog Grooming in a few days.

Let’s analyze what a title like Learn Pascal in Three Days could mean:

• Learn: In 3 days you won’t have time to write several significant programs, and learn from your successes and failures with them. You won’t have time to work with an experienced programmer and understand what it is like to live in that environment. In short, you won’t have time to learn much. So they can only be talking about a superficial familiarity, not a deep understanding. As Alexander Pope said, a little learning is a dangerous thing.
• Pascal: In 3 days you might be able to learn the syntax of Pascal (if you already knew a similar language), but you couldn’t learn much about how to use the syntax. In short, if you were, say, a Basic programmer, you could learn to write programs in the style of Basic using Pascal syntax, but you couldn’t learn what Pascal is actually good (and bad) for. So what’s the point? Alan Perlis once said: “A language that doesn’t affect the way you
  think about programming, is not worth knowing”. One possible point is that you have to learn a tiny bit of Pascal (or more likely, something like Visual Basic or JavaScript) because you need to interface with an existing tool to accomplish a specific task. But then you’re not learning how to program; you’re learning to accomplish that task.
• in Three Days: Unfortunately, this is not enough, as the next section shows.

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

Researchers (Bloom (1985), Bryan & Harter (1899), Hayes (1989), Simmon & Chase (1973)) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) thought it took longer than ten years: “Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price.” And Chaucer (1340-1400) complained “the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.” Hippocrates (c. 400BC) is known for the excerpt “ars longa, vita brevis”, which is part of the longer quotation “Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile”, which in English renders as “Life is short, [the] craft long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult.” Although in Latin, ars can mean either art or craft, in the original Greek the word “techne” can only mean “skill”, not “art”.

Here’s my recipe for programming success:

• Get interested in programming, and do some because it is fun. Make sure that it keeps being enough fun so that you will be willing to put in ten years.
• Talk to other programmers; read other programs. This is more important than any book or training course.
• Program. The best kind of learning is learning by doing. To put it more technically, “the maximal level of performance for individuals in a given domain is not attained automatically as a function of extended experience, but the level of performance can be increased even by highly experienced individuals as a result of deliberate efforts to improve.” (p. 366) and “the most effective learning requires a well-defined task with an appropriate difficulty level for the particular individual, informative feedback, and opportunities for repetition and corrections of errors.” (p. 20-21) The book Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life is an interesting  reference for this viewpoint.
• If you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a graduate school). This will give you access to some jobs that require credentials, and it will give you a deeper understanding of the field, but if you don’t enjoy school, you can (with some dedication) get similar experience on the job. In any case, book learning alone won’t be enough. “Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter” says Eric Raymond, author of The New Hacker’s Dictionary. One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he’s produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub.
• Work on projects with other programmers. Be the best programmer on some projects; be the worst on some others. When you’re the best, you get to test your abilities to lead a project, and to inspire others with your vision. When you’re the worst, you learn what the masters do, and you learn what they don’t like to do (because they make you do it for them).
• Work on projects after other programmers. Be involved in understanding a program written by someone else. See what it takes to understand and fix it when the original programmers are not around. Think about how to design your programs to make it easier for those who will maintain it after you.
• Learn at least a half dozen programming languages. Include one language that supports class abstractions (like Java or C++), one that supports functional abstraction (like Lisp or ML), one that supports syntactic abstraction (like Lisp), one that supports declarative specifications (like Prolog or C++ templates), one that supports coroutines (like Icon or Scheme), and one that supports parallelism (like Sisal).
• Remember that there is a “computer” in “computer science”. Know how long it takes your computer to execute an instruction, fetch a word from memory (with and without a cache miss), read consecutive words from disk, and seek to a new location on disk. (Answers here.)
• Get involved in a language standardization effort. It could be the ANSI C++ committee, or it could be deciding if your local coding style will have 2 or 4 space indentation levels. Either way, you learn about what other people like in a language, how deeply they feel so, and perhaps even a little about why they feel so.
• Have the good sense to get off the language standardization effort as quickly as possible.

With all that in mind, its questionable how far you can get just by book learning. Before my first child was born, I read all the How To books, and still felt like a clueless novice. 30 Months later, when my second child was due, did I go back to the books for a refresher? No. Instead, I relied on my personal experience, which turned out to be far more useful and reassuring to me than the thousands of pages written by experts.

Fred Brooks, in his essay No Silver Bullets identified a three-part plan for finding great software designers:

1. Systematically identify top designers as early as possible.
   
2. Assign a career mentor to be responsible for the development of the prospect and carefully keep a career file.
   
3. Provide opportunities for growing designers to interact and stimulate each other.

This assumes that some people already have the qualities necessary for being a great designer; the job is to properly coax them along. Alan Perlis put it more succinctly: “Everyone can be taught to sculpt:Michelangelo would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers”.

So go ahead and buy that Java book; you’ll probably get some use out of it. But you won’t change your life, or your real overall expertise as a programmer in 24 hours, days, or even months.

Bryan, W.L. & Harter, N. “Studies on the telegraphic language:The acquisition of a hierarchy of habits. Psychology Review, 1899, 8, 345-375

Hayes, John R., Complete Problem Solver Lawrence Erlbaum, 1989.

Chase, William G. & Simon, Herbert A. “Perception in Chess” Cognitive Psychology, 1973, 4, 55-81.

Lave, Jean, Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Approximate timing for various operations on a typical 1GHz PC in summer 2001:

Several people have asked what programming language they should learn first. There is no one answer, but consider these points:

• Use your friends. When asked “what operating system should I use, Windows, Unix, or Mac?”, my answer is usually: “use whatever your friends use.” The advantage you get from learning from your friends will offset any intrinsic difference between OS, or between programming languages. Also consider your future friends: the community of programmers that you will be a part of if you continue. Does your chosen language have a large growing community or a small dying one? Are there books, web sites, and online forums to get answers from? Do you like the people in those forums?
• Keep it simple. Programming languages such as C++ and Java are designed for professional development by large teams of experienced programmers who are concerned about the run-time efficiency of their code. As a result, these languages have complicated parts designed for these circumstances. You’re concerned with learning to program. You don’t need that complication. You want a language that was designed to be easy to learn and remember by a single new programmer.
• Play. Which way would you rather learn to play the piano: the normal, interactive way, in which you hear each note as soon as you hit a key, or “batch” mode, in which you only hear the notes after you finish a whole song? Clearly, interactive mode makes learning easier for the piano, and also for programming. Insist on a language with an interactive mode and use it.

Given these criteria, my recommendations for a first programming language would be Python or Scheme. But your circumstances may vary, and there are other good choices. If your age is a single-digit, you might prefer Alice or Squeak (older learners might also enjoy these). The important Nthing is that you choose and get started.

Appendix: Books and Other Resources

Several people have asked what books and web pages they should learn from. I repeat that “book learning alone won’t be enough” but I can recommend the following:

• Scheme: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Abelson & Sussman) is probably the best introduction to computer science, and it does teach programming as a way of understanding the computer science. You can see online videos of lectures on this book, as well as the complete text online. The book is challenging and will weed out some people who perhaps could be successful with another approach.
• Scheme: How to Design Programs (Felleisen et al.) is one of the best books on how to actually design programs in an elegant and functional way.
• Python: Python Programming: An Intro to CS (Zelle) is a good introduction using Python. Several online tutorials are available at Python.org.
• Oz: Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming (Van Roy & Haridi) is seen by some as the modern-day successor to Abelson & Sussman. It is a tour through the big ideas of programming, covering a wider range than Abelson & Sussman while being perhaps easier to read and follow. It uses a language, Oz, that is not widely known but serves as a basis for learning other languages.

五年前，我出版了《TOEFL核心词汇21天突破》（世界图书出版公司，ISBN: 7-5062-6219-3），再版三次，加印数次，销量（正版）超过20万册。成为很多备考托福学生手中必备的书籍。那本书在这五年之中当然也成为我心情愉悦的根源之一。既能帮助别人又能自己赚钱，除了努力之外多少还要靠运气。前些日子，我把《TOEFL核心词汇21天突破》制作成“简明网络版”，放在网上，希望那本书能够帮助更多的人。

我的新书《TOEFL iBT® 词汇专题突破》（暂定名）正在紧张制作之中；这次我有意独自出版，并只通过网络销售。（点击这里查看《TOEFL iBT® 词汇专题突破》的词汇文本。）

与《TOEFL核心词汇21天突破》不同，《TOEFL iBT® 词汇专题突破》更加强调的是“通过上下文记忆词汇”。这些年的教学经验告诉我，很多学生缺乏的不仅仅是词汇。更多的时候，即便已经背过许多单词，有些学生依然无法读懂文章。究其原因，学生缺乏的是“概念”以及“概念与概念之间的逻辑联系”。比如，大多数学生认识“destruction”，也认识“habitat”，但不知道“habitat destruction”是“濒临灭绝动物所面临的最大威胁之一”；再比如，很多学生背过“prey”，知道这个单词是“被掠食者”的意思，但根本就没有与刚刚背过的“predator”（掠夺者, 食肉动物）联系起来，尽管这两个单词都是“p”字母开头，所以通常在单词书的同一个列表之中；更进一步，很少有学生知道“birds of prey”是“食肉鸟”的意思。

托福考试是一个考试范围明确的考试。在《新托福官方指南》中，ETS清楚地说明，该考试的阅读文章、听力录音的内容在以下范围之内：

BASIC CATEGORY

• Arts
• Life Science
• Physical Science
• Social Science

Arts

1. Architecture
2. Industrial design/art
3. City planning
4. Crafts: weaving, knitting, fabrics, furniture, carving, mosaics, ceramics, etc; folk and tribal art
5. Cave/rock art
6. Music and music history
7. Photography
8. Literature and authors
9. Books, newspapers, magazines, journals

Life science

1. Extinction of or conservation efforts for animals and plants
2. Fish and other aquatic organisms
3. Bacteria and other one-celled organisms
4. Viruses
5. Medical techniques
6. Public health
7. Physiology of sensory organs
8. Biochemistry
9. Animal behavior, e.g., migration, food foraging, defensive behavior
10. Habitats and the adaptation of animals and plants to them
11. Nutrition and its impact on the body
12. Animal communication

Physical science

1. Weather and atmosphere
2. Oceanography
3. Glaciers, glacial landforms, ice ages
4. Deserts and other extreme environments
5. Pollution, alternative energy, environmental policy
6. Other planets’ atmospheres
7. Astronomy and cosmology
8. Properties of light, optics
9. Properties of sound
10. Electromagnetic radiation
11. Particle physics
12. Technology of TV, radio, radar
13. Math
14. Chemistry of inorganic things
15. Computer science
16. Seismology (plate structure, earthquakes, tectonics, continental drift, structure of volcanoes)

Social science

1. Anthropology of non-industrialized civilizations
2. Early writing systems
3. Historical linguistics
4. Business, management
5. TV/radio as mass communication
6. Social behavior of groups, community dynamics, communal behavior
7. Child development
8. Education
9. Modern history (including the history of urbanization and industrialization and their economic and social effects)

因为托福考试的考核内容范围清楚，所以，“radical”这个单词在托福中只能是“剧烈的、激烈的”，而不可能是“激进的”，因为托福的内容基本上不涉及政治；“cardinal”这个单词在托福中不可能是“红衣主教”的意思，因为托福的内容不涉及宗教，“cardinal”在托福中只能是形容词“重要的、首要的”，相当于“principal”。

我在编写《TOEFL核心词汇21天突破》的时候，主要依赖的是词频统计工具。当时为了准确统计词频，购买了Oxford University Press发行的词频统计工具“WordSmith Tools”，自己编制TOEFL语料库，而后在电脑统计结果的基础上再进行人工筛选，工作量之大是最初远远没有想到的。但是付出的辛苦有着巨大的回报——那本书的前言的标题就是“从12000到2140”。

这一次的《TOEFL iBT® 词汇专题突破》不仅仅是最大限度地包含“2140个核心词汇”，更重要的是，要让学生在语境中学习这些词汇，不仅了解这些词汇的基本含义，更重要的是要了解这些词汇所表示的概念与其它的概念之间的联系。细想想就能明白，如若一个学生认识“warp”（[纺]经线, 经纱）却不认识“weft”（[纺]纬线, 纬纱），那其实是相当荒谬的。

一下是《TOEFL iBT® 词汇专题突破》的两段摘录：

135

The three major subdivisions of the world ocean are the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and the Indian Ocean, which are bounded by the continental masses. The two minor subdivisions of the world ocean are the Southern Ocean, bounded by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current to the north and Antarctica to the south, and the Arctic Ocean, almost landlocked except between Greenland and Europe. From the shorelines of the continents a submerged part of the continental mass, called the continental shelf, extends sea ward an average distance of 75 km; it varies in width from nearly zero to 1,500 km. The shelf gives way abruptly at a depth of about 200m to a steeper zone known as the continental slope, which descends about 3,500 m. The continental rise, a gradually sloping zone of sediment that is considered part of the ocean bottom, extends about 600 km from the base of the continental slope to the flat abyssal plains of the deep-ocean floor. In the central parts of the oceans are the midocean ridges, which are extensive mountain chains with inner troughs that are heavily intersected by cracks, called fracture zones. The ridge system seems to merge into the continents in several areas, such as the Red Sea and the Gulf of California, and such areas are regions of great geologic activity, characterized by volcanoes, or earthquakes and faults. The midocean ridges play a key role in plate tectonics (movements in the earth’s crust), for it is from the inner troughs of these ridges that molten rock upwells from the earth’s mantle and spreads laterally on both sides, adding new material to the earth’s rigid crustal plates.

150

The farther a glacier moves from its source of accumulation into warmer, lower-elevation regions, the more likely it is to ablate, or melt. As the ice ablates, it begins to deposit the material it has eroded in the mountains, as well as any rock debris that has fallen into its crevasses. Just as streams of liquid water create landforms when they deposit their load of material, streams of frozen water—glaciers—drop their burden and shape the landscape as they recede.

《TOEFL iBT® 词汇专题突破》总计包括192个小单元。为了保证“最少文本中涵盖最多核心词汇”的同时保证“地道且有意义的文字”，这些单元中的文本摘录、改编、缩写自微软的在线百科《Encarta》。在最终的版本中，这些文本还将配有mp3朗读文件。

講座內容：如何成功申請美國TOP 50名校錄取？

主講人：李笑來

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講座贈送：

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在香港期間，若預約與李笑來老師面談，可直接發郵件至zhangwen@eduise.com

工作人員會當日聯繫預約人。

9月22日、9月23日，浙大紫金港校区两场讲座。见识了浙大学生社团的无限活力，也感受到了浙大学生的灵性。

讲座内容：美国留学规划/留学考试准备（2009年入学）
主讲人：董良 李笑来

２４号（星期一）１６：００——１８：００
上海交通大学（闵行）　逸夫楼２００

２５号（星期二）１８：００——２０：００
上海外国语大学（松江）　三教楼３３５９

２６号（星期三）１７：４５——１９：４５
上海复旦大学（杨浦）三教楼３１０９Ａ

记得有一次被自己的土鳖样吓了一跳是因为读一本书读了一大半，才反应过来“Socrates”是“苏格拉底”。

今天看一篇文章，愣是没反应过来“Balzac”是“巴尔扎克”，尽管文章里说，这人小时候经常被老师罚站……

这样的事儿与智商明显是没有关系的，但常常能让自己感觉到无地自容。