【推荐1】The North Star, also known as Polaris, is often used by campers to help them find their way when they get lost.     1     You can use them to find the North Star and help you if you lose your direction, or just find the North Star for fun if you’re into star gazing.

    2     You can use the Big Dipper(北斗七星)to find the Little Dipper. The Little Dipper is the constellation(星座)that contains the North Star. The tip of the Little Dipper’s handle is the North Star. If you’re able to locate the Little Dipper, you can easily spot the North Star.

Locate the North Star with your smart phone. There are many smart phone applications that work something like a telescope. You allow the phone to find your location, and then point your phone to the sky. The phone acts as interactive map, identifying stars and constellations for you.     3    

Buy a star atlas(星图). If the idea of carrying your phone around while stargazing kills the fun for you, consider buying a star atlas instead. You should also always take an atlas with you when hiking in case your phone battery dies.     4     A star atlas is a book that breaks down the night sky by the region and time of year. You can use it to locate the North Star on any given night.

    5     You can use desktop applications for your computer to know how the sky will look on a given night. These devices can help you plan ahead. You’ll go outside with a rough idea of where you can expect to find the North Star.

【推荐3】The Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that you can’t step into the same river twice, for you aren’t the same person at each visit, and the water is ever flowing. It is a powerful way to represent the reality of impermanence: Everything is always changing.

Many people have tense relationships with change. They deny it, resist it or attempt to control it- the result of which is almost always some combination of stress, anxiety, and burnout. It doesn’t have to be that way.

A concept called allostasis can help. Developed in the late 1980s by a neuroscientist, Peter Sterling, and a biologist, Joseph Eyer, allostasis is defined as “stability through change,” elegantly showing the concept’s double meaning: The way to stay stable through the process of change is by changing, at least to some extent.

The river of change has been flowing mercilessly, and it shows no signs of letting up. Societally, we’ve gone through a pandemic (大流行病), its economic decline and the widespread adoption of social media, the combination of which has shifted how we live and work. In our personal lives, we continue to do what we have always done: relocate, start jobs, quit jobs, change jobs, get promoted, experience illness, get married, have children, retire and on and on.

Finding ways in this river requires both ruggedness and flexibility. To be rugged is to be tough and determined, to know your core values and what you stand for. To be flexible is to actively respond to changing circumstances, to adapt and bend easily without breaking, to grow and even change your mind. Put these qualities together and the result is a great endurance, one that helps you maintain your strong core even in fragile moments. It allows you to step into allostasis’s cycle of order, disorder and reorder — which is, of course, one and the same with stepping into Heraclitus’s river —and to chart it skillfully and whenever possible, to your own benefit.

【推荐1】“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” Captain Ahab’s dying declaration of defiance (抗争) is among the most famous passages in Herman Melville’s novel.

In reality, such victories of the hunted over the hunter were a fantasy in the cruel world of industrial whaling. The biggest cetacean of them all, the blue whale, had all but disappeared from the Southern Ocean by the time a ban on hunting it was introduced in 1967.

Sightings of the largest mammal ever to live on the earth had been rare in the region since then. Not any more. A survey of coastal waters around the island of South Georgia in the sub-Antarctic has had remarkable results.

In just over three weeks, in the krill-rich waters of what was once their main feeding ground, the movements of 55 Antarctic blues were recorded by the British Antarctic Survey. The finding was described as “truly, truly amazing” by one cetacean specialist. It suggests that when a comprehensive audit (审计), due in 2021, is carried out, there is a good chance that the species will prove to be in full recovery mode, as are humpbacks and other whales in the southern hemisphere.

Three years ago, the Natural History Museum established a 25m skeleton (骨架) of a blue whale and named it Hope, intending to inspire new generations to build a sustainable future.

The return of the world’s most splendid ocean travellers to southern waters should serve as an example for wider possibilities of conservation. Ecological wrongs can be righted, or at least mitigated, with sufficient will and organisations.

The more general comeback of the whale - for which environmental campaigners should take a great deal of credit — can be an inspiration for victories yet to be won. It could also act as an added motivation to action on the climate emergency.

【推荐3】When we think about pirates (海盗), there is a nearly universal image that comes to mind, which has been made to continue throughout pop culture. Pirates have developed quite the reputation for saying things such as “Shiver me timbers!” and “Arrr!” and for having a fake leg—maybe even sporting a parrot on their shoulder. This idea of pirates, both in the way they speak and the way they look, develops mostly from the popular novel Treasure Island and one of its movie adaptations. Unfortunately, it probably doesn’t have much bearing in reality.

Treasure Island was serialized in a magazine from October 1881 to January 1882 and published in a book form 1883. It was written by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson under the pseudonym pen-name “Captain George North.” The novel follows teenager Jim Hawkins, who finds himself in possession of a map that leads to buried treasure. Sounds familiar, right? Jim leads the reader on a wild adventure, encountering pirates such as the one-legged Captain Long John Silver and Israel Hands, who want to take the treasure for themselves.

While the novel Treasure Island certainly influenced the way we think of pirates—and especially their imaginary tendency for burying treasure and marking it on secret maps—it’s the 1950 movie adaptation of the book, directed by Byron Haskin, that gave us the typical image of pirates and pirate talk. It’s in this movie where audiences first heard pirates employ words such as “matey” and say “arrrr” instead of “yes.” Long John Silver always has a parrot on his shoulder, and other pirates in the movie wear eye patches and have hooks for hands, bringing together some existing piratical stereotypes. Subsequent pirate films, from The Goonies (1985) to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), show influence of the mannerisms, speech, and even costuming established by Treasure Island.