标题其实是我对Niall Ferguson的2012年睿思讲座之一，“Civil and Uncivil Society”的翻译。
我从2013年开始听Podcast，第一个对我影响深远的节目就是2012年的睿思讲座，主题是“The Rule of Law and Its Enemies”, 而”Civil and Uncivil Societies”是最后一讲。我从这一讲听起，因为开篇的故事很有意思——这是我第一次听说扶轮社——主体内容很有价值，结尾的问答更是火花四溅，我被深深吸引进去，这才进入了Reith Lectures这个宝藏。其实我很早就翻译了这个系列，但是因为其中多处谈到中国事务，放出来难免惹事，就一直躺在电脑里。现在人工智能大发展，翻译的价值有限，也就没那么多热情了。
今日上海的面貌使我们已经难以想象她之前的样子，所以BBC记者Clive James记录下的1989年5月的上海就弥足珍贵了。
Clive James在上海生活了一个月，影片记录了当时普通人的衣食住行，也记录了今天不太为人知道的街头运动。至少从文案质量上看，今天的网红还是要跟着Clive学习一个。
解说词有一种英国人有距离的没心没肺的幽默感，在今天可以一笑置之。影片结尾说看起来中国正在毫无顾忌地拥抱资本主义，没有任何发生激烈的冲突迹象。很有讽刺意义。
上海永安百货老板郭标的四女儿Daisy Kwok（郭婉莹）在影片中接受采访，
讲述自己从前的优裕生活和在文革中的经历。
无意中看到了这个片子，Rick Stein’s Taste of Shanghai. 其中列举了很多值得一去的上海餐馆。我记录在下面以便下次去上海的时候按图索麒。加粗的是Rick Stein非常推荐的。
I’m a big fan of <A history of Britain> and <Power of Art>, so inevitably became of fan of Simon Schama.
Face of Britain is the new documentary from Simon Schama. I just watched the 1st part, Face of Power. It’s just as brilliant as the other Simon Schama documentaries. In particular, I like Simon Schama’s way of story telling. For example, here’s the opening story of the first part.
On Churchill’s 80th birthday on 1954, the painting commissioned a portrait for him as a present to proclaim his contribution and leadership during WWII.
By the time the parliament is about to unveil this painting in an formal assemble, Churchill had already seen it and hated it. Here’s how he remarked:
The portrait is a remarkable example of modern art.
Churchill hated this painting so much that in the end this painting was burned.
Wikipedia has a page for this story, but it was found out rather recently that the painting was burnt soon after the event.
Simon Schama uses this story to show the “will contest” between the painter and the person being portrayed. I was fascinated instantly.
I guess it’s not easy to get journalism and algorithm together. Finally here’s comes a documentary about algorithms, made by BBC – The Secret Rules of Modern Living: Algorithms.
It’s intended for general public, so it’s just a gentle introduction. From Euclid’s algorithm to find greatest common divisor to different sorting algorithms to traveling sales man problem to matching algorithm and eventually to machine learning. The algorithms are well illustrated and explained. It’s just enough to expose the audience to the world of algorithm without intimidating them. More importantly, from what I can see, there’s no misconceptions that are commonly seen in introductions of algorithms made by mass media (except maybe the comparison between bubble sort and merge sort is overly simplified and didn’t take memory consumption into consideration).
One interesting scene in the documentary: President Obama was in an interview and was presented a typical computer science question:
“What is the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers?”
After some hesitation, he actually answered:
“I think Bubble Sort would be the wrong way to go.”
Not bad for a president, I must say. Some say it is staged. But it’s still funny to see how Mr. President tried to circumvent the real question with a safe correct answer. You can see the interview here on YouTube.
As I said before, I don’t think there is a single “Chinese way of teaching”. In addition, the Chinese ways of teaching are also changing. However, there are characters that are commonly agreed to be associated with Chinese ways of teaching: emphasis on discipline and order, rely primarily on repetition and memorization.
In the discussion provoked by the BBC documentary, “Are our kids touch enough: Chinese school”, I’ve seen a lot of people praising these characters. Well, here’s an antidote to the obsession of academic achievement:
Mind you, I don’t see this as a full argument against Chinese way of teaching. I’d love to get more cases like Gillian Lynne from Mr. Ken Robinson. However, this talk at least challenges us, reminds us to look further, wider, beyond academic achievement, in education. I’ll provide a Chinese translation to the transcript in another post.
The documentary Test you Brain from National Geographic is awesome!
Illusions are well known to human, but not all of them have been well illustrated in action. The problem is, some of the illusions are very best described in experiment to shows all the intricacies. For that we need carefully designed experiments and video making. This is the first time I saw something like this is made.
As an example, here’s how this documentary illustrated an attention saturation situation devised in David Copperfield’s studio:
First you see a magician told you that he wanted to do something not at all legal with money. After showing you the cash, then messing around it, the silently putting it back to his pocket, you’re asked, “did you notice anything?”.
Of course you didn’t. Then the video rewind and show you what had happened before and after.
Then another video shot by a camera from another angel showed you these changes were made actually well you were watching. You didn’t notice only because you didn’t pay attention to them.
So after you see this, you cannot help to say to yourself, aha, that’s how they’ve deceived me. But then you have to rethink about perception and illusion.
While it’s not available in Youtube, we Chinese can already watch it here:
Have been watch documentaries for years now, especially BBC ones. Looking back, not every one of them left the same impression or impact. Here are the ones I’d like to share with others (With links to docuwiki.net, where you can find more information about these documentaries):
After “Power of Art”, I’m a fan of Simon Schama now. Two weeks ago I downloaded “A history of Britain”. I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s already ranked very high in my list. 🙂
Something in common in these 2 documentaries: In both of them, there are great music. The music in the opening scene of “Power of Art” is lovely (Moonlight Sonata?), the music in the opening scene of “A history of Britain” is also very intriguing, anyone knows what it is?
I downloaded this series 6 moths ago. I tried watch it but seemed that the content seemed too difficult for me – This is the first time I take on a documentary that is art subject. My vocabulary is simply not enough.
In the past days, I forced myself to take notes on sentences that I didn’t understand, and then lookup, and then review the video. Till yesterday night, I finished the first 4 parts. What I can say is, it worth every minute of the effort!
A lot of praise out there already for this great documentary. There’s not much I can add to that. I only hope the future generation will have this kind of art eye-opening in their classroom, or I’ll have to show them this great documentary.