English Recordings

Hugh Murray
Canton register, Chinese repository
William Milne
Walter Henry Medhurst
Elijah Coleman Bridgman
Benjamin Hobson
James Legge
Sir Thomas Francis Wade
William Parsons Martin
John Shaw Burdon
John Fryer
Biggerstaff
Henry Wheaton
Fresenius
Glasgow Kerr
Sir Robert Hart
Anson Burlingame
Alexander Wylie
Joseph Edkins
Muirhead
Carl Kreyer
Macgowan
David Ames Wells
John Allen

Mr. Kurzweil says that he is simply trying to put analytical clothing on the concept so that people can think more clearly about the future. And regardless of any debate about his intentions, if you’re encountering the Singularity in the business world and elsewhere today, it’s most likely his take.
Bursts of Innovation
Peter H. Diamandis, 49, is a small man with a wide, bright smile and a thick mound of dark hair. He routinely holds meetings by cellphone and can usually be found typing away on his laptop. He went to medical school to make his mother happy but has always dreamed of heading to outer space.
He is also a firm believer in the Singularity and is a technocelebrity in his own right, primarily through his role in commercializing space travel. At a recent Singularity University lunch, he hopped up to make a speech peppered with passion and conviction.
“My target is to live 700 years,” he declared.
The students chuckled.
“I say that seriously,” he retorted.
The NASA site, the Ames Research Center, houses an odd collection of unusual buildings, including a giant wind tunnel, a huge supercomputing center and a flight simulator facility with equipment capable throwing people 60 feet into the air.
Today, the government operates NASA Ames as a bustling, public-sector-meets-private-sector technology bazaar. Start-ups, universities and corporations have set up shop here, and Google plans to build a new campus here over the next few years that will include housing for workers.
A nondescript structure, Building 20, is the Singularity University headquarters, and most students stay in nearby apartments on the NASA land. Mr. Kurzweil set up the school with Mr. Diamandis, who, as chief executive of the X Prize Foundation, doled out $10 million in 2004 to a team that sent a private spacecraft 100 kilometers above the earth. Google has offered $30 million in rewards for an X Prize project intended to inspire a private team to send a robot to the moon. And a $10 million prize will go to the first team that can sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days at a cost of $10,000 or less each — which, in theory, would turn an expensive, complex lab exercise into an ordinary affair.
Mr. Diamandis champions the idea that large prizes inspire rapid bursts of innovation and may pave a path to that 700-year lifetime.

Mr. Kurzweil writes: “Once nonbiological intelligence gets a foothold in the human brain (this has already started with computerized neural implants), the machine intelligence in our brains will grow exponentially (as it has been doing all along), at least doubling in power each year.
“Ultimately, the entire universe will become saturated with our intelligence,” he continues. “This is the destiny of the universe.”
The underlying premise of the Singularity responds to people’s insecurity about the speed of social and technological change in the computer era. Mr. Kurzweil posits that the computer and the Internet have changed society much faster than electricity, phones or television, and that the next great leap will occur when industries like medicine and energy start moving at the same exponential pace as I.T.
He believes that this latter stage will occur when we learn to manipulate DNA more effectively and arrange atoms and have readily available computers that surpass the human brain.
In 1970, well before the era of nanobot doctors, Mr. Kurzweil’s father, Fredric, died of a heart attack at his home in Queens. Fredric was 58, and Ray was 22. Since then, Mr. Kurzweil has filled a storage space with his father’s effects — photographs, letters, bills and newspaper clippings. In a world where computers and humans merge, Mr. Kurzweil expects that these documents can be combined with memories harvested from his own brain, and then possibly with Fredric’s DNA, to effect a partial resurrection of his father.
By the 2030s, most people will be able to achieve mental immortality by similarly backing up their brains, Mr. Kurzweil predicts, as the Singularity starts to come into full flower.
Despite such optimism, some Singularitarians aren’t all that fond of Mr. Kurzweil.
“I think he’s a genius and has certainly brought a lot of these ideas into the public discourse,” says James J. Hughes, the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a nonprofit that studies the implications of advancing technology. “But there are plenty of people that say he has hijacked the Singularity term.”

“Most of us were going to school to get knowledge and a degree,” says Aaron Kleiner, who studied with Mr. Kurzweil at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later became his business partner. “He saw school as a tool that let him do what he needed to do.”
Some of Mr. Kurzweil’s better-known inventions include the first print-scanning systems that converted text to speech and allowed the blind to read standard texts, as well as sophisticated electronic keyboards and voice-recognition software. He has made millions selling his inventions, and his companies continue developing other products, like software for securities traders and e-readers for digital publications.
He began his march toward the Singularity around 1980, when he started plotting things like the speed of chips and memory capacity inside computers and realized that some elements of information technology improved at predictable — and exponential — rates.
“With 30 linear steps, you get to 30,” he often says in speeches. “With 30 steps exponentially, you get to one billion. The price-performance of computers has improved one billion times since I was a student. In 25 years, a computer as powerful as today’s smartphones will be the size of a blood cell.”
His fascination with exponential trends eventually led him to construct an elaborate philosophy, illustrated in charts, that provided an analytical backbone for the Singularity and other ideas that had been floating around science-fiction circles for decades.
As far back as the 1950s, John von Neumann, the mathematician, is said to have talked about a “singularity” — an event in which the always-accelerating pace of technology would alter the course of human affairs. And, in 1993, Vernor Vinge, a science fiction writer, computer scientist and math professor, wrote a research paper called “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.”
“Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence,” Mr. Vinge wrote. “Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”
In “The Singularity Is Near,” Mr. Kurzweil posits that technological progress in this century will be 1,000 times greater than that of the last century. He writes about humans trumping biology by filling their bodies with nanoscale creatures that can repair cells and by allowing their minds to tap into super-intelligent computers.

Throughout “Transcendent Man,” Mr. Kurzweil is presented almost as a mystic, sitting in a chair with a shimmering, circular light floating around his head as he explains his philosophy’s basic tenets. During one scene at a beach, he is asked what he’s thinking as he stares out at a beautiful sunset with waves rolling in and wind tussling his hair.
“Well, I was thinking about how much computation is represented by the ocean,” he replies. “I mean, it’s all these water molecules interacting with each other. That’s computation.”
Mr. Kurzweil is the writer, producer and co-director of “The Singularity Is Near,” the tale of Ramona, a virtual being he builds that gradually becomes more human, battles hordes of microscopic robots and taps the lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz for legal advice and the motivational guru Tony Robbins for guidance on personal interactions.
With his glasses, receding hairline and lecturer’s ease, Mr. Kurzweil, 62, seems more professor than thespian. His films are just another facet of the Kurzweil franchise, which includes best-selling books, lucrative speaking engagements, blockbuster inventions and a line of health supplements called Ray & Terry’s (developed with the physician Terry Grossman).
Mr. Kurzweil credits a low-fat, vegetable-rich diet and regular exercise for his trim frame, and says he conquered diabetes decades ago by changing what he ate and later reprogramming his body with supplements. He currently takes about 150 pills a day and has regular intravenous procedures. He is also co-writer of a pair of health books, “Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever” and “Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever.”
Mr. Kurzweil routinely taps into early memories that explain his lifelong passion for inventing. “My parents gave me all these construction toys, and sometimes I would put things together, and they would do something cool,” he says. “I got the idea that you could change the world for the better with invention — that you could put things together in just the right way, and they would have transcendent effects.
“That was kind of the religion of my family: the power of human ideas.”
A child prodigy, he stunned television audiences in 1965, when he was 17, with a computer he had built that composed music. A couple of years later, in college, he developed a computer program that would seek the best college fit for high school students. A New York publishing house bought the company for $100,000, plus royalties.

The university represents the more concrete side of the Singularity, and focuses on introducing entrepreneurs to promising technologies. Hundreds of students worldwide apply to snare one of 80 available spots in a separate 10-week “graduate” course that costs $25,000. Chief executives, inventors, doctors and investors jockey for admission to the more intimate, nine-day courses called executive programs.
Both courses include face time with leading thinkers in the areas of nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, energy, biotech, robotics and computing.
On a more millennialist and provocative note, the Singularity also offers a modern-day, quasi-religious answer to the Fountain of Youth by affirming the notion that, yes indeed, humans — or at least something derived from them — can have it all.
“We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father. “That is what it means to be human — to extend who we are.”
But, of course, one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia.
In the years since the Unabomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, violently inveighed against the predations of technology, plenty of other more sober and sophisticated warnings have arrived. There are camps of environmentalists who decry efforts to manipulate nature, challenges from religious groups that see the Singularity as a version of “Frankenstein” in which people play at being gods, and technologists who fear a runaway artificial intelligence that subjugates humans.
A popular network television show, “Fringe,” playfully explores some of these concerns by featuring a mad scientist and a team of federal agents investigating crimes related to the Pattern — an influx of threatening events caused by out-of-control technology like computer programs that melt brains and genetically engineered chimeras that go on killing sprees.
Some of the Singularity’s adherents portray a future where humans break off into two species: the Haves, who have superior intelligence and can live for hundreds of years, and the Have-Nots, who are hampered by their antiquated, corporeal forms and beliefs.
Of course, some people will opt for inadequacy, while others will have inadequacy thrust upon them. Critics find such scenarios unnerving because the keys to the next phase of evolution may be beyond the grasp of most people.
“The Singularity is not the great vision for society that Lenin had or Milton Friedman might have,” says Andrew Orlowski, a British journalist who has written extensively on techno-utopianism. “It is rich people building a lifeboat and getting off the ship.”
Peter A. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and a major investor in Facebook, is a Singularity devotee who offers a “Singularity or bust” scenario.
“It may not happen, but there are a lot of technologies that need to be developed for a whole series of problems to be solved,” he says. “I think there is no good future in which it doesn’t happen.”
‘Transcendent Man’
In late August, Mr. Kurzweil will begin a cross-country multimedia road show to promote “Transcendent Man,” a documentary about his life and beliefs. Another of his projects, “The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future,” has also started to make its way around the film festival circuit.

Merely Human? That’s So Yesterday
ON a Tuesday evening this spring, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, became part man and part machine. About 40 people, all gathered here at a NASA campus for a nine-day, $15,000 course at Singularity University, saw it happen.
While the flesh-and-blood version of Mr. Brin sat miles away at a computer capable of remotely steering a robot, the gizmo rolling around here consisted of a printer-size base with wheels attached to a boxy, head-height screen glowing with an image of Mr. Brin’s face. The BrinBot obeyed its human commander and sputtered around from group to group, talking to attendees about Google and other topics via a videoconferencing system.
The BrinBot was hardly something out of “Star Trek.” It had a rudimentary, no-frills design and was a hodgepodge of loosely integrated technologies. Yet it also smacked of a future that the Singularity University founders hold dear and often discuss with a techno-utopian bravado: the arrival of the Singularity — a time, possibly just a couple decades from now, when a superior intelligence will dominate and life will take on an altered form that we can’t predict or comprehend in our current, limited state.
At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past.
Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process. For those who haven’t noticed, the Valley’s most-celebrated company — Google — works daily on building a giant brain that harnesses the thinking power of humans in order to surpass the thinking power of humans.
Larry Page, Google’s other co-founder, helped set up Singularity University in 2008, and the company has supported it with more than $250,000 in donations. Some of Google’s earliest employees are, thanks to personal donations of $100,000 each, among the university’s “founding circle.” (Mr. Page did not respond to interview requests.)

Today, I overslept heartily this morning, since I didn`t need to hurry with anything.
So I got up very late and ate cold noodles for a late brunch.
In the late afternoon I went out for teaching one kid who is my friend`s daugher.
One of my friends wanted me to/ asked me that I teach Chinese to her daughter.
So from past week I began to teach her one hour in the late afternoon every Friday/ on every Friday late in the afternoon. I feel it`s good.
Her daughter is so cute and bright / smart.
When I went out from my house, I took Betty and Zzang-Ah, because near by her house there`s a small and nice mountain.
I like that small mountain path, so when after finishing teaching , I wanted to walk with Betty an dZzang-ah through that small path.
Do you know that how much Betty and Zzang-ah like it?
Oh, while I teach that little girl, Betty and Zzang-ah are waiting in my car with gently / quietly.They are really good dogs!
bangbang1June 18, 2012 Today`s pictures: The first – A small path / a narrow path to the woods.
The second- rose colored leaves / rose petals that were fallen on the ground?

(June 17. 2012) <Practice Describe Something>
I’ll try to practice describing this time, even though it’s not easy writing with my cellphone for me.
Please correct my mistakes. Thank you very much for reading.
( June 17 2012, Afternoon)

Now there are two glasses of iced coffee and one cup of hot coffee on this table.
My son and my husband both ordered iced coffee, and I ordered hot coffee.
Today is a sunny day.
Everything is shining under the bright sunlight.
I can see people passing by out of a big window and parked cars at the side of the road.
( =I can see passing peoples out of a big window and cars are parked at the side of the road. )
There are not many people so it gives me a somewhat peaceful feeling (=a kind of peaceful feeling.)
The air conditioner on the ceiling is working well.
There is music playing (/being played )now,
and it seems like(/ to be some) African style of music.
( =Music is paying now, it seems like an African style of music.)

It seems that my husband is asleep now.
Hmm… …We’d better go home.

But worm authors are hardly absolved of blame. By putting their code freely on the Web, virus writers essentially dangle temptation in front of every disgruntled teenager who goes online looking for a way to rebel. A cynic might say that malware authors rely on clueless script kiddies the same way that a drug dealer uses 13-year-olds to carry illegal goods -- passing the liability off to a hapless mule.

''You've got several levels here,'' says Marc Rogers, a former police officer who now researches computer forensics at Purdue University. ''You've got the guys who write it, and they know they shouldn't release it because it's illegal. So they put it out there knowing that some script kiddie who wants to feel like a big shot in the virus underground will put it out. They know these neophytes will jump on it. So they're grinning ear to ear, because their baby, their creation, is out there. But they didn't officially release it, so they don't get in trouble.'' He says he thinks that the original authors are just as blameworthy as the spreaders.

Sarah Gordon of Symantec also says the authors are ethically naive. ''If you're going to say it's an artistic statement, there are more responsible ways to be artistic than to create code that costs people millions,'' she says. Critics like Reitinger, the Microsoft security chief, are even harsher. ''To me, it's online arson,'' he says. ''Launching a virus is no different from burning down a building. There are people who would never toss a Molotov cocktail into a warehouse, but they wouldn't think for a second about launching a virus.''

What makes this issue particularly fuzzy is the nature of computer code. It skews the traditional intellectual question about studying dangerous topics. Academics who research nuclear-fission techniques, for example, worry that their research could help a terrorist make a weapon. Many publish their findings anyway, believing that the mere knowledge of how fission works won't help Al Qaeda get access to uranium or rocket parts.

But computer code is a different type of knowledge. The code for a virus is itself the weapon. You could read it in the same way you read a book, to help educate yourself about malware. Or you could set it running, turning it instantly into an active agent. Computer code blurs the line between speech and act. ''It's like taking a gun and sticking bullets in it and sitting it on the counter and saying, 'Hey, free gun!''' Rogers says.

Some academics have pondered whether virus authors could be charged under conspiracy laws. Creating a virus, they theorize, might be considered a form of abetting a crime by providing materials. Ken Dunham, the head of ''malicious code intelligence'' for iDefense, a computer security company, notes that there are certainly many examples of virus authors assisting newcomers. He has been in chat rooms, he says, ''where I can see people saying, 'How can I find vulnerable hosts?' And another guy says, 'Oh, go here, you can use this tool.' They're helping each other out.''