Shaking up the nascent market for electronic books for the second time in two months, Amazon.com will begin selling e-books for reading on Apple’s popular iPhone and iPod Touch.
A study, published today, offers significant evidence that vitamin D could be a possible treatment for #MS in the future.
Vitamin D could repair nerve damage in multiple sclerosis, study suggests
A protein activated by vitamin D could be involved in repairing damage to…
CAM.AC.UK
nascent
adjective FORMAL
only recently formed or started, but likely to grow larger quickly:
a nascent political party
a nascent problem
serendipity Show phonetics
noun [U] FORMAL
the lucky tendency to find interesting or valuable things by chance
━━ n. 思わぬ発見をする特異な才能.serendipitous Show phonetics
adjective FORMAL
Reading should be an adventure, a personal experience full of serendipitous surprises.
(from Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary)
wsj
I like the idea of serendipitous broadcasting. After all, journalism is all about being in the right place at the right -- or wrong -- time. But it's going to require some coordination. After all, you can't expect your friends to monitor your Web page on the off-chance you stumble into a riot/earthquake/orgy. (Although they might, if their lives aren't that exciting.) More likely is the idea that this kind of technology could improve the nascent movement of citizen journalism -- where ordinary folks contribute words, pictures or videos to community sites or mainstream media.
我喜歡"不經意式廣播"這個主意。歸根到底新聞就是要在恰當的時間出現在恰當的地方。但這還需要一些協調。畢竟你不能指望你的朋友時刻盯著你的網頁﹐以便萬一你碰上暴亂、地震或是狂歡時﹐他們能看到你上傳的實時視頻──雖然如果你的朋友們日子過得太無聊﹐他們可能會這樣做。更現實的一種想法是這種技術可能會提升新興的平民記者運動﹐這樣普通老百姓也可以向社區網站或是主流媒體提供文字、圖片或是視頻素材。
梁永安
因為一些特別符號進不了su，我只刊登了原文一部分，全文是：
We are indebted to the English author Horace Walpole for coining the word serendipity. In one of his 3,000 or more letters, on which his literary reputation primarily rests, and specifically in a letter of January 28, 1754, Walpole says that "this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word." Perhaps the word itself came to him by serendipity. Walpole formed the word on an old name for Sri Lanka , Serendip. He explained that this name was part of the title of "a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip : as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of . . . One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity ( for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for, comes under this description) was of my Lord Shaftsbury [Anthony Ashley Cooper], who happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Clarendon's [Edward Hyde], found out the marriage of the Duke of York [later James II] and Mrs. Hyde [Anne Hyde, Clarendon's daughter], by the respect with which her mother [Frances Aylesbury Hyde] treated her at table."
我們非常感激英國作家賀瑞斯·沃爾浦爾創造了單詞 serendipity。他文學上的聲譽主要依靠他的三千封或更多的信件中的一封hc
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2004-06-11 16:03:31
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2004/6/11讀An unforgettable odyssey（Jun 10th 2004 From The Economist print edition），想起我們Simon University資料庫中，至少弄過兩篇與它相關的文章。
譬如說，講Bloomsday的2004年慶典Rejoice和最有名的莫莉獨白：” The very end of the book is almost as well-known as the beginning: “I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” A great book? Yes it is Yes. “
關於這獨白怎麼翻譯，James Joyce專家莊信正博士有論文。他寫給一般人看的專欄，比較容易讀，有篇名「”Serendipity”」，解釋作者James Joyce如何得到「頓悟（初心）」（epiphanies，寫作前向神靈祈求靈感）而寫出許多名章。（收入『文學風流』台北：時報，2001， pp.216-19）
我想每一回合上網，都應有點新意，所以這次談今年被美國Webster辭典選為最熱門的字眼：”Serendipity”。
莊先生說，這字指「純憑機緣而能得到稱心如意的發現」。他的應用例都是James Joyce作品。包括其法文翻譯本的妙手。
據我所知，關鍵字 Serendipity（有的人翻譯為"偶發性"，不甚恰當），它有得來全不費功夫的自然機運，「由於偶然或敏銳而獲得的發現，是未預期的結果。」出自 「錫蘭（斯里蘭卡，阿拉伯文Serendip）有三位王子運氣特別好。」的故事，18世紀由英國作家創用】。
然而，真正發揚光大的是20世紀的社會學大師Robert Merton（ -2003），參考（Robert Merton《社會研究與社會政策》（林聚任等譯，北京：三聯，2001，附錄第325頁起；他在此主題有研究，專書由普林斯頓大學出版社出版The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity : A Study in Historical Semantics and the Sociology of Science(HRD) Merton, Robert K. /Barber, Elinor G. /Publisher:Princeton Univ Pr Published 2004/01。）
我在2003年紀念張忠樸先生談G. E. Box先生認為試驗設計的應用就是確保有”Serendipity”之效的科學藝術，對它有完整的說明。
***
馮象將書名翻譯為"奇緣"
Serendipities : language and lunacy / Umberto Eco ; translated by
WilliamWeaver
談到但丁的"論俗語"與喬姆斯基語言論的巧合
2007-05-03 21:06:43
***Serendipities : language and lunacy / Umberto Eco ; translated by
WilliamWeaver
--Paul Lauterbur
Apr 4th 2007
From The Economist print edition
Paul Lauterbur
A wild and serendipitous life in nuclear medicine
Apr 4th 2007
Paul Lauterbur, father of MRI, died on March 27th, aged 77
APTHE whole history of modern science, Paul Lauterbur once joked, might be written on the basis of papers turned down by academic journals. His own experience was a case in point. In 1971 he sent a paper to Nature; it was rejected. The Nature folk were especially unimpressed by the fuzziness of the pictures that accompanied the piece. Never mind that they showed the difference between heavy water (with deuterium atoms) and ordinary water (with hydrogen atoms) in a way that no image had done before. Never mind that nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) had been used for the first time to make those images, and could henceforth be used, with just a little development, to make non-invasive pictures of brains and spinal cords. Never mind that this technique, in 2003, was to win Mr Lauterbur a joint share in the Nobel prize for medicine. It did not yet look professional enough.
Nor did some other aspects of Mr Lauterbur`s work. His core discovery, of how to get spatial information about atoms in a magnetic field, was scribbled on a paper napkin over dinner in a Big Boy restaurant in Pittsburgh, between two bites of a hamburger. His early exploration of this idea, building up two-dimensional images of the soft interiors of organisms by spectroscopy, was performed on green peppers or on clams which his small daughter collected on the beach. His speciality for a long time, before he had developed the technology he needed, was fuzziness—or rather, that interesting gradation of shading, pinpointed by hydrogen atoms, that showed where the water content of the cells was changing, and tissues were becoming diseased.
There was always something serendipitous, even wild, about Paul Lauterbur`s approach to science. As a boy in the Ohio countryside he trespassed widely in search of terrapins, fish and birds; as a teenager he built his own lab in the basement of his house, entranced by the strange vials in his chemistry set and by the stink of burning sulphur. His greatest joy, he reported, was to be left alone to explore the world or to experiment. His chemistry teacher at school was understanding, allowing him to lark around with apparatus, just within the limit of danger and expulsion, at the back of the class. His army superiors were kind when he was drafted in the 1950s, letting him spend his time setting up and running an early NMR machine; by the end of his service, when his colleagues had nothing but a cropped head to show for it, he had produced four scientific papers. Academic authorities, first at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and then at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, were aware of his low boredom threshold and let him rove between his native chemistry, physics and medicine, knowing that if this professor was left to himself he might well produce something extraordinary.
Mapping pathologies
What Mr Lauterbur did was not, in its essence, brand new. The fact that the nuclei of atoms were magnetic, acting like tiny compass needles, had been discovered in the 1940s. When those nuclei were aligned in a strong magnetic field and bombarded with radio waves, they would send back radio signals of the internal structure of substances; this had been observed in 1952, and NMR machines had been built to exploit it. But Mr Lauterbur was the first to introduce gradients, or variations, into the magnetic field, allowing him clearly to track where atoms were and to take “slices” of what he was observing in two dimensions. He began with rubber and silica, then progressed to bivalves and mice. By taking many slices, he could then build a three-dimensional image of organs and other soft tissue that could not be seen by X-rays.
Mr Lauterbur had a grand name for his discovery: “zeugmatography”, from the Greek zeugma, or yoke, since he had linked together both chemical and spatial information. The name did not catch on and nor, for some time, did the NMR machine. The first company that produced them, of which Mr Lauterbur briefly became president in 1971, almost went bust. Radiography departments in hospitals clung rigidly to X-rays, dangerous though they were, for making diagnoses. “Nuclear magnetic resonance” proved a terrifying concept to patients, who thought they were about to undergo a micro-version of Hiroshima. But Mr Lauterbur, undaunted, continued to work to improve the technique and went round the world promoting it. By the time he died, more than 22,000 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines were in use, and more than 60m scans were being carried out each year.
What the machines see now is almost incredible. A tiny ripple of water in the brain, tracked by hydrogen atoms, that shows the passage of a stroke; a patch of inflammation in the spinal cord, indicating multiple sclerosis; the narrowing of a blood vessel, and constriction of the flow, that presage heart disease. Mr Lauterbur believed MRI could get better and better, until the living body could actually be watched at work. He believed, too, that it might begin to throw up clues about the origins of life; and that in time that fascinating fuzziness, too, would become as clear as day.
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2007-05-03 20:59:14
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