2 . THE WORLD’S UNUSUAL AIRLINES

Founded in 2009 in Delray Beach, Florida, Pet Airways was an airline specially designed for pets such as cats and dogs. Each plane could carry about 50 pets, with “Pet Attendants” checking on them every 15 minutes. The airline operated for about two years, serving a dozen US cities. In 2012, the airline ran into financial trouble and started canceling flights. It shut down completely the following year, after having ferried about 9,000 pets.

Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System (JPATS) is the largest prison (监狱) transport network in the world. It is an airline of the US government that transports prisoners to and from detention centers, courts and prisons. It is sometimes also called “Con Air”. Although the airline is mainly used for a prison, it also takes part in military and state law operations.

Skytraders is an Australian airline that provides special air services for the Australian Federal Government. It was founded in 1979 and is headquartered at 180 Jersey Road, Woollahra, New South Wales, Australia. This airline offers flights to Antarctica. The airline was chosen because of its great safety systems. An ACJ (Airbus Corporate Jet) is operated between Hobart and a hard glacier (冰川) runway near Casey Station.

Janet Airlines, commonly known as Janet, is an unofficial name given to top-secret aircraft that carry high-ranking officials to Special Access Facilities. The airline can be seen serving the mysterious Area 51 and Tonopah Test Range. The passengers in Janet Airlines board through the west side of the airport, from a special part of Harry Reid International Airport. This area isn’t open to other civilians and there is also a small terminal (航站楼) building for Janet’s passengers.

3 . Praising kids is an important part of building their self-respect and confidence. But before you start praising, there are some important dos and don’ts to keep in mind that will help your child find value in your words of encouragement.

    1    . Instead of saying “you are a hard-working boy”, say “Boy, you really worked hard on that paper”. Being specific helps kids to realize what has been done in the right way or identify with the special skills they have.

Don’t keep praising their talents. Of course, parents would love to talk about them and that is all right.     2    , your praise will begin to sound empty to them and have little meaning.

Focus on the process. Praise children for their effort and hard work. Remember, it’s the process not the product that matters. After all, not all kids with their talents will be great athletes or brilliant musicians. But children who learn to work hard have a special talent.     3    .

Say it when you mean it. Say “Good job” only when they have accomplished a really demanding task. It tells your children that you know the difference between when they work hard at something and when it comes easy.

Actually, kids have a way of knowing whether your praise is sincere or not.     4    . Worse yet, they don’t know who else they can turn to for help in the world when they are in real difficulties.     5    .

4 . Everyone dreams of pleasure, but few know how to obtain it and at what cost. Surprisingly, some of the most useful tips come not from modern psychology but from a 2,000-year-old Greek philosopher, Epicurus.

Yes, he dreamed of a life of pleasure but not as we typically think of the word. For Epicurus, pleasure consisted not of a presence of anything but an absence—a complete lack of anxiety. “It is better for you to lie upon a bed of straw and be free of fear, than to have a huge palace yet be troubled in mind,” he said.

We now live in a golden age of pleasure. So many options lie just a click away: delicious food, better smartphones and nicer cars…

“Such things are traps,” Epicurus would say. “Beyond a certain point, pleasure cannot be increased—just as a bright sky cannot get any brighter—but only varied. The new smartphones or cars represent pleasure varied, not increased. That is why the new car that thrilled you on the test drive bores you after a month on the road. Yet our entire consumer culture is based on the assumption that pleasure varied equals pleasure increased. It leads to needless unhappiness.”

Epicurus also thought a lot about a question we have ignored very often: How much is enough? “Live a natural life and welcome whatever goodness comes its way. Don’t grow dependent on unnatural pleasures since each of them comes with hidden costs-not only monetary but also psychological,” Epicurus would say. “Don’t live beyond your natural needs. Nature has made the necessary desires easy to satisfy and the unnecessary ones difficult. Bananas grow on trees. Expensive cars don’t. Natural desire will guide us toward the highest pleasures and away from the unnecessary ones.”

Friendship, Epicurus thought, is life’s greatest pleasure, especially during mealtimes. “To eat and drink alone is to devour like the lion and the wolf,” he said. “The meal does not have to be good. With the right mindset, and in the right company, even a simple pot of cheese will turn out to be a feast.”

5 . If you’ve ever emerged from the shower or returned from your walk with a clever idea or a solution to a problem you had been struggling with, it may not be a surprise. Rather than constantly concentrating on a problem, research from the last 15 years suggests that people may be more likely to have creative breakthroughs when they’re doing a habitual task that doesn’t require much thought.

“People always get surprised when they realize they get interesting, novel ideas at unexpected times,” says Kalina Christoff, a scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, “because our culture tells us that we should do it through hard work.”

Now researchers begin to understand why these clever thoughts occur during more passive activities and what’s happening in the brain. They have found that the key is a series of brain activities—within what’s called the default mode (DM) network—that occur while an individual is resting or performing habitual tasks that don’t require much attention.

“Simply put, it is a state that your brain returns to when you’re relaxed,” explains Christoff. “By contrast, when you’re working on a demanding task, the brain’s executive control (EC) systems keep your thinking focused, analytical, and logical.”

Researchers find that the DM network is also involved in the early stages of idea generation, drawing from past experiences and knowledge about the world. When your mind wanders, you’re allowing thoughts to playfully cross your mind, which helps you combine information and ideas in new ways and something clicks.

“A cautionary note: While the DM network plays a key role in the creative process, it is the EC systems that help you to evaluate and apply the creative ideas effectively to your problems in the real world,” Christoff says. “So it’s unwise to place blind faith in the discovery that creative ideas can be generated in the shower or during any other kinds of mind wandering. Instead, you have to do the work to set the groundwork for creative ideas to emerge in the first place.”

6 . In living memory, no world leader has been as widely identified with a particular animal as Queen Elizabeth with her dogs. They are seen with her on so many occasions that they have become a key part of her public image.

They are more than her public image, though. In a life that is full of rules, they provide an easy way for the Queen to break the ice with strangers. She also gets from them unlimited amounts of true love and affection, unaffected by the knowledge that she is a queen. Whenever possible, the Queen feeds the dogs herself and leads them on daily walks. Her husband, Prince Philip, has referred to these chores (杂活) as his wife’s private “dog moments”.

When the Queen was young, the dogs kept her company, too. During WWII, she and her sister Margaret were moved to Windsor Castle in secret while their parents stayed at Buckingham Palace to face the bombing with the public. Through the war’s long days and nights, they could be relied upon to comfort them. Jane, in particular, was Elizabeth and Margaret’s childhood strength.

On her 18th birthday, the Queen was given a two-month-old baby dog, Susan. They soon became inseparable. In 1947, hidden under blankets in the carriage, Susan rode with the Queen as she left with Prince Philip for their honeymoon in Scotland.

Susan became such a public figure that, when Elizabeth gave birth to her first baby—Charles, The Mirror asked readers to advise the Queen on how to keep Susan from growing jealous (妒忌的) of the infant. One of the answers read: “First, hug Susan all the time. Second, let Susan have a bowl of milk when you are nursing the baby.” A year later, Susan produced two babies—Sugar (who belonged to the infant Prince Charles) and Honey (who lived with the Queen Mum).

In the minds of dog fans, Susan remains the most significant figure. This is not because she was the Queen’s dog. It is because her genes have been so long-lived—Susan is the common ancestor of all the Queen’s dogs.

7 . Thanks to its geographical advantages, China’s province of Jiangsu has played a starring role in China’s ancient Maritime Silk Road. Today, it still has a lot of ancient sites related to it.

Nanjing

In 1403, the Emperor of Ming dynasty ordered the construction of a fleet (舰队) of “treasure boats” under the command of Zheng He, who led seven historical sea voyages across the world. It was one of the largest and most advanced fleets the world had ever seen. A reconstruction of one of the ships can be seen at the Treasure Shipyard Relic Park in Nanjing.

Taicang

From Jiangsu’s busy port city of Taicang, goods have flowed in and out of the province by water for centuries. In the busy port, Lusi, where visitors can try the freshest seafood at Lusi Seafood Market, huge vessels sail the same waters where Zheng He set out on his historic adventures centuries earlier. It’s a continuity of commerce and exploration which shows that the historic Maritime Silk Road has never really gone away.

Yangzhou

In the city of Yangzhou, which is famous for its Huaiyang cuisine and historic gardens, there is a Tang-dynasty temple. In the 8th century, Jianzhen lived there before he attempted several sea voyages to Japan to spread the teachings of Buddhism there. It can still be visited on Shugang Mountain today.

Lianyungang

Close to the present-day city of Lianyungang in northern Jiangsu is Kongwang Mountain. Visitors can climb the mountain to view a collection of the earliest Buddhist carvings. These carvings prove the importance of the Maritime Silk Road and Jiangsu province’s role in the spread of religion across China.

8 . How to be more patient every day

These days, patience is practically on the endangered species list as far as virtues go.    1    What’s more, patience enables you to work collaboratively (协作) have good relationships with others, and move toward goals. Here are some strategies to help you develop patience.

Set up cues

Choose an activity you perform frequently throughout the day and think of the word “patience” every time you do it. If you find yourself forgetting about this as the day wears on, simply resume(重新开始) the practice as soon as you remember.    2    You’ll start to notice that you’re handling situations differently from how you would have before.

Visualize success

Visualize a situation that would normally challenge you. See yourself smiling and breathing as you wait for the line to move, and add some positive statements.     3    Your mind will start to process the pretend scenario as a real experience in which you did the right thing, helping to set you up for future successes.

Meditate (冥想)

    4    Here is an easy technique you can try anywhere: Close your eyes and imagine filling your mind with your favorite color, and then let the color drown out the voice that is thinking about yesterday or tomorrow.

Slow down

When racing around seems like the only way to get where you need to be on time, it becomes your default setting. But most adults do not feel happy when they’re rushing, and children are even less capable of doing it with a good attitude.    5    

9 . Plato (柏拉图) was upset about the invention of the alphabet (字母表) because, with this “technology”, learners would not use their memories and thus appear to be a know-it-all but actually know nothing. If Plato were alive today, what would he say about ChatGPT? ChatGPT, a conversational artificial intelligence program released recently by OpenAI, is a significant advancement that can produce articles comparable to good high school essays.

When I asked ChatGPT a range of simple questions, the answers were well-reasoned and clear. It’s also interactive: I could ask for more details or request changes. But then, on trickier topics or more complicated concepts, ChatGPT gave completely wrong answers.

However, that doesn’t mean ChatGPT can’t be a useful tool in education. Schools have already been dealing with the Internet’s wealth of knowledge, along with its misleading essay mills (制造厂). One way has been to change how they teach. Rather than listen to a lectures in class and then go home to research and write an essay, students listen to recorded lectures and do research ai home, then write essays in class, with supervision, even cooperation with peers (同龄人) and teachers. This is called flipped classrooms, in which students wouldn’t use ChatGPT to create a whole essay. Instead, they’d use it as a tool to generate critically examined building blocks of essays.

Plato was wrong to think that memory itself is a goal rather than a means for people to have facts so they can make better analyses and arguments. As Plato was wrong to fear the written word as the enemy, we would be wrong to think we should resist a process that allows us to gather information more easily.

The way forward is not just to feel regret for replaced skills, as Plato did, but also to recognize that as more complex skills become essential, our society must fairly educate people to develop them. And then it always goes back to the basics. Value people as people, not just as packs of skills. And that isn’t something ChatGPT can tell us how to do.