The life and the dream

http://www.sina.com.cn  2009年10月12日 02:03  第一财经日报

　　罗媛楠

　　近日，江苏的《新华日报》报道了一些主要产棉市县出现转基因棉花(14085,-25.00,-0.18%)大规模暴发黄萎病的现象。该报道称，许多棉田出现枯萎病和黄萎病混发状况，病情严重的田块将减产七成。同时，有农民反映，这些转基因棉花导致次生虫害日益严重，农民将农药量增加了数倍，却依然不能改变大多数棉花枯死的结果。

　　其实，这已经不是转基因作物第一次暴露出类似的严重问题。世界上其他国家已有的现实和研究结果都清楚地表明，不只是转基因棉花，包括其他的转基因作物，比如转基因大豆(3694,20.00,0.54%)等在内的各种转基因物种，在疾病和虫害的攻击面前都显得更加脆弱。在已经大范围普及转基因大豆的美国，已有的研究表明，转基因大豆的种植反而增加了农药的使用量，同时，土壤肥力下降，植物的病虫害加剧。

　　美国农业部针对1996～2003年的统计显示，抗除草剂转基因作物(包括玉米(1739,20.00,1.16%)、大豆和棉花)大量种植后，其田间的除草剂使用量反而增加了。该项统计显示，转基因作物种植的头三年(1996～1998)，转基因作物的确比常规作物少使用除草剂，但2001～2003年，转基因作物却比常规作物多使用了3630万公斤除草剂。

　　除了上述转基因技术对作物本身的长期灾害外，面对日益严重的气候变化现象，转基因作物的表现也显得更加糟糕。有研究指出，转基因棉花在遇到极端 温度波动时，性能表现不佳，而转基因大豆受到高压气流的影响后产量下降较多，表现远远不及传统大豆品种。面对已经越来越多发生的极端天气，这样的转基因作 物如何能保障我们的粮食安全？

　　虽然已有上述种种转基因作物的悲剧发生，但是，在各种商业利益和复杂权利的驱动下，转基因水稻的商业化批准在中国已经被提上日程。基于科学家们 的各类研究和屡屡发生的灾害，我们有充分的理由相信，上述诸种问题极有可能发生在我国即将投入巨资发展的转基因水稻上。作为一个有着13亿庞大人口的国 家，一旦其主要粮食作物——水稻普遍遭遇虫害、疾病和恶劣天气的侵袭，那么，对于种植稻米的农民、食用稻米的消费者，甚至于我们国家的粮食安全而言，都将 意味着毁灭性的灾难。如果转基因水稻被商业化批准，继而大范围在我国推广种植，这样可怕的情形便随时有可能发生。

　　众所周知，自古水稻便是我国最重要的粮食作物，是中国相当一部分农民赖以为生的经济来源。作为水稻的发源地，我国有丰富的稻米品种，更有诸如稻 田养鸭等多种多样的生态水稻种植方式。依靠我们这个民族上千年积累下来的丰富的水稻耕作经验，辅之以恰当的先进的科学技术，我国的水稻完全能够养活我们庞 大的人口，如同过去这几十年我们向世界所证明的那样。不仅如此，如果我们能够继续扬长避短，因地制宜地充分发展生态种植方式，我们甚至能够提供更加优质的 稻米。

　　既然水稻如此重要，那么，哪怕对转基因技术存有一丝怀疑，我们都不应该冒险将我国的粮食安全送上一条未知路。更何况，包括转基因水稻在内的技术 在科学领域尚且是个极有争议的问题，而已有的案例也证明了转基因作物对种植环境、农民生计的负面影响。那么，我们就没有必要着急于大规模商业化推广，漠视 转基因技术的潜在风险，将安全寄托给没有保障的可能。是时候在转基因水稻的噩梦真正来临之前清醒过来了。

　　(作者系某NGO组织食品与农业项目主任)

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神所造的都是最好的。人自以为是的修改，最终带来的只能是灾难。我们是应当在噩梦真正来临前醒来，悔改，接受主耶稣基督的拯救，回归神。

Okay, so you're a Ruby developer. You groove on Ruby and all of Ruby's goodness (and there's much goodness in Ruby.) Like Ruby, Scala has very expressive, good looking syntax (Ruby's syntax is a little more pleasing to my eye) with a nice integration of OO and Functional paradigms. Yeah, Scala's got closures, mixins, and functions as parameters, etc. Scala in web development has the same "change the code, reload the page, see the changes" as Ruby/Rails. There are things in Scala that you may groove on as well. Here's my list:

1. Performance and stability. Scala is fast. It's very fast. It's (in my experience) 10-100 times faster than Ruby. Scala is fast without sacrificing programmer productivity because Scala's got all the goodness of Ruby's "functional" side. Scala support native OS threads so you can write a Scala program that takes advantage of all the cores and CPUs you've got on your machine. Scala doesn't crash. I don't get [BUG] and a program termination (one of my Ruby projects is a parallel calculation job that runs on 10 machines and I get random failures on 0.5% of my jobs... they crash, usually when doing floating point math.) Yeah, YARV and other things are coming real soon now (Christmas 2007) but Scala's got them today.
2. Richer XML and collection classes. Scala has built-in syntactic support for XML (it's kind of like having eRB as part of the language) and the XML classes are richer (and much, much faster) than Ruby's. Scala's collection classes are richer than Ruby's (mutable and immutable, linked lists, etc.) so that you have a broader range of how you can build your application.
3. More of a functional flavor. Scala makes it easy (and intuitive) to write functional style code. "So?" you say. "Much of Ruby's beauty and productivity comes from its functional side," I say. Scala makes it easy to write recursive functions that manipulate sets (think of when you realized that Ruby's looping constructs were more powerful than for (x = 0; x < 10; x++)). This means more "writing code that is side effect free" which means writing more maintainable code.
4. Much better facilities for writing DSLs. Scala's syntax is more flexible and expressive that Ruby's. Scala Domain Specific Languages can be constructed from existing language elements (like Ruby.) Here's an example:

   val query = select fields ("first" of characterVarying(50)) from "person" 
                     where ("last" in "person")=="'D.'"
   

   Another example is Scala's parser library which allows you to have BNF style expressions right in your Scala code. From a Textile Parser (which has a similar line count to RedCloth), you can see valid Scala code:

      def lineElem : Parser[Textile] = 
          not(blankLine) &&& (beginingOfLine ||| endOfLine ||| image ||| footnote_def ||| anchor |||
   			  dimension ||| elipsis |||
    			  copyright ||| trademark ||| registered ||| emDash ||| enDash ||| italic |||
    			  emph |||
    			  cite |||  span ||| code ||| delete ||| insert  ||| sup |||
    			  sub ||| bold  ||| html||| single_quote ||| quote ||| acronym  ||| charBlock)
   

5. Static typing without getting in your face. Scala is strongly typed, but not an ugly, repeat, repeat, repeat yourself sort of way. You have to declare the type of function (method) parameters. The compiler figures almost everything else out for you.
   myList.map {i => i.toString}.toList.mkString("{",",","}") is a legal construct
   Scala's typing doesn't "get in your face" on the other hand, Scala catches silly mistakes like mistyping a variable name, etc.

There are also strengths that Ruby has over Scala. Ruby is much better than Scala at scripting tasks. Scala doesn't have Regexs at the language level (they're libraries.) Ruby scores big time in my book for having Regex in the language. Ruby's syntax is marginally cleaner to me than Scala's. Ruby's open classes are nicer than Scala's implicit type conversion, but implicit type conversion is more secure and maintainable than open classes. Ruby's meta-programming features are easier to access than Scalas, but Scala supports run-time class generation. I find that chaining and currying functions is more maintainable and easier to debug than meta-programming in Ruby.

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A bit old.  Still useful.

1 But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. 2 He prayed to the LORD, "O LORD, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. 3 Now, O LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live."

 4 But the LORD replied, "Have you any right to be angry?"

 5 Jonah went out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. 6 Then the LORD God provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the vine. 7 But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the vine so that it withered. 8 When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah's head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, "It would be better for me to die than to live."

 9 But God said to Jonah, "Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?"
      "I do," he said. "I am angry enough to die."

 10 But the LORD said, "You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. 11 But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?"

问题一

如果你家附近有一家餐厅，东西又贵又难吃，桌上还爬着蟑螂，你会因为它很近、很方便，就一而再、再而三地光临吗？

回答：你一定会说，这是什么烂问题，谁那么笨，花钱买罪受？

可同样的情况换个场合，自己或许就做类似的蠢事。

不少男女都曾经抱怨过他们的情人或配偶品性不端，三心二意，不负责任。明知在一起没什么好的结果，怨恨已经比爱还多，但却“不知道为什么”还是要和他搅和下去，分不了手。说穿了，只是为了不甘，为了习惯，这不也和光临餐厅一样？

——做人，为什么要过于执著？！
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问题二

如果你不小心丢掉100块钱，只知道它好像丢在某个你走过的地方，你会花200块钱的车费去把那100块找回来吗？

回答：一个超级愚蠢的问题。

可 是，相似的事情却在人生中不断发生。做错了一件事，明知自己有问题，却死也不肯认错，反而花加倍的时间来找藉口，让别人对自己的印象大打折扣。被人骂了一 句话，却花了无数时间难过，道理相同。为一件事情发火，不惜损人不利已，不惜血本，不惜时间，只为报复，不也一样无聊？失去一个人的感情，明知一切已无法 挽回，却还是那么伤心，而且一伤心就是好几年，还要借酒浇愁，形销骨立。其实这样一点用也没有，只是损失更多。

——做人，干吗为难自己？！
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问题三

你会因为打开报纸发现每天都有车祸，就不敢出门吗？

回答：这是个什么烂问题？当然不会，那叫因噎废食。

然而，有不少人却曾说：现在的离婚率那么高，让我都不敢谈恋爱了。说得还挺理所当然。也有不少女人看到有关的诸多报道，就对自己的另一半忧心忡忡，这不也是类似的反应？所谓乐观，就是得相信：虽然道路多艰险，我还是那个会平安过马路的人，只要我小心点，不必害怕过马路。

——做人，先要相信自己。
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问题四

你相信每个人随便都可以成功立业吗？

回答：当然不会相信。

但据观察，有人总是在听完成功人士绞尽脑汁的建议，比如说，多读书，多练习之后，问了另一个问题？那不是很难？

我们都想在3分钟内学好英文，在5分钟内解决所有难题，难道成功是那么容易的吗？改变当然是难的。成功只因不怕困难，所以才能出类拔萃。

有一次坐在出租车上，听见司机看到自己前后都是高档车，兀自感叹：“唉，为什么别人那么有钱，我的钱这么难赚？”我心血来潮，问他：“你认为世上有什么钱是好赚的？”他答不出来，过了半晌才说：好像都是别人的钱比较好赚。

其实任何一个成功者都是艰辛取得。我们实在不该抱怨命运。

——做人，依靠自己！

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问题五

你认为完全没有打过篮球的人，可以当很好的篮球教练吗？

回答：当然不可能，外行不可能领导内行。

可是，有许多人，对某个行业完全不了解，只听到那个行业好**，就马上开起业来了。我看过对穿着没有任何口味、或根本不在乎穿着的人，梦想却是开间服装店；不知道电脑怎么开机的人，却想在网上**，结果道听途说，却不反省自己是否专业能力不足，只抱怨时不我与。

——做人，量力而行。

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问题六

相似但不相同的问题：你是否认为，篮球教练不上篮球场，闭着眼睛也可以主导一场完美的胜利？

回答：有病啊，当然是不可能的。

可是却有不少朋友，自己没有时间打理，却拼命投资去开咖啡馆，开餐厅，开自己根本不懂的公司，火烧屁股一样急着把辛苦积攒的积蓄花掉，去当一个稀里糊涂的投资人。亏的总是比赚的多，却觉得自己是因为运气不好，而不是想法出了问题。

——做人，记得反省自己
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问题七

你宁可永远后悔，也不愿意试一试自己能否转败为胜？

解答：恐怕没有人会说：“对，我就是这样的孬种”吧。

然 而，我们却常常在不该打退堂鼓时拼命打退堂鼓，为了恐惧失败而不敢尝试成功。以关颖珊赢得2000年世界花样滑冰冠军时的精彩表现为例：她一心想赢得第一 名，然而在最后一场比赛前，她的总积分只排名第三位，在最后的自选曲项目上，她选择了突破，而不是少出错。在4分钟的长曲中，结合了最高难度的三周跳，并 且还大胆地连跳了两次。她也可能会败得很难看，但是她毕竟成功了。

她说：“因为我不想等到失败，才后悔自己还有潜力没发挥。”

一个中国伟人曾说；胜利的希望和有利情况的恢复，往往产生于再坚持一下的努力之中。

——做人，何妨放手一搏。

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问题八

你的时间无限，长生不老，所以最想做的事，应该无限延期？

回答：不，傻瓜才会这样认为。

然 而我们却常说，等我老了，要去环游世界；等我退休，就要去做想做的事情；等孩子长大了，我就可以…… 我们都以为自己有无限的时间与精力。其实我们可以一步一步实现理想，不必在等待中徒耗生命。如果现在就能一步一步努力接近，我们就不会活了半生，却出现自 己最不想看到的结局。

——做人，要活在当下。

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觉得很有意思，虽然并不完全赞同。