陶杰：色欲都市男

2008/06/15
苹果日报

中环的OL都知道，香港有一种装扮基佬的小男人──当你把他当做姊妹，向他诉说八卦事，以为他是一位模范的聆听者。坐在公园的长櫈子，依偎在他的肩上，告诉他你方遭情变，他温柔地劝慰着，还递过来一条丝绣的手绢，为你抹去泪痕。

当你把「她」当成闺中密友，请「她」来香闺过夜，在「她」面前换衣服，与「她」共卧一床，一宿无话──那精致的肌肤，弯弯的睫毛，像一个婴儿般的睡相，是那么无害而纯真，直到那个黑色暴雨警告之夜，你在「她」的家中，欣赏着「她」珍藏的一本本男时装杂志时，忽然，这位「女朋友」突然孔武有力地把你抱住，压倒在他的单人牀上的竹席子上……

这时候，女人才发觉上当，但已经太迟。窗外闪过几劈白昼般的闪电，黑雨爆砸着玻璃窗，女人才惊讶地发觉，眼前这个像「哥哥」一样柔媚的男子，一夜之间变成了姜中平，自己成为他黑雨下的一件点心。

香港有一种「诈基纳福」的博懵型异色小男人。他们像变色龙，当《色欲都市》上映的时候，女人要格外小心，跟你就这出电影特别谈得来的男人──他和你一样，原来是 Sex and the City电视片集六年来的fan士，在四个女主角中，跟你一样，他最喜欢老得有性格的凯丽（Carrie），最讨厌色情狂的萨曼莎（Samantha），与他谈论片集改编成的电影，我的天，大家的志趣一样，有一千○一夜说不尽的话题，而且更令人惊异地，你和他都觉得片中的凯丽，有七分像张爱玲。当你为如此雷同的品味与他击掌为盟，大家跪在床上，他咭咭地妖笑起来──从他迎着阳光一拨头发的那个艳丽手势，你肯定他是一个基佬，不但撤除了警戒，而且还认定他是你的一个闺中的灵伴，也就是所谓soul-mate。

但是，且慢，一切看来不是太完美了吗，眼前这个可疑的男子？他从何处来，往何处去，为什么一夜之间令人有投契得像是一对隔世的孪生姊妹花？

《色欲都市》是许多淫贱小男人的一层粉红色的包装。当你才与他相识不足一月，因为这部片集和这出至hit的OL电影而突然拉近了心灵，在这个不知是人是鬼的乱世──如为什么委任的一干副局长都是外籍，到底是真爱国还是英美卧底──人面吊诡，心机险恶，反而要加紧提防。

因为暑假将至，他今天提议，七月与你一起双双游布吉，共订一间房。他说，他的姊姊开旅行社，消费八折，他要你今天五时前答覆。这时候，请从头思索一遍，他为什么强调他是「Sex and the City迷」？第六感告诉人，其中有诈，拒绝他的旅行offer吧。

陶杰：中东潮型英语

2008/06/21
苹果日报

奥运在北京举行，中国政府大举扫荡「中式英语」（Chinglish），例如：入口，不该叫Enter the Mouth，为了迎接国际游客，更正为Entrance。还有干炒牛河，本来叫Dry Fry Cow River的，据说也「规范」成合格的英文了。

但是，其实英文在世界上已经到处跟不同的语言姘交，讲Chinglish，最新的潮流，完全不必自觉老土，而可以是很型的生活态度，看看阁下有没有自卑感，只认定英女皇的英文才是正宗。

因为在中东，以杜拜为中心，今天流行另一种「中式英语」，叫做 Dinglish──中式，是指中东的阿拉伯话和印度语渗透之后的另类英文，因为地球一体化，许多英美CEO到中东和印度开会、做生意、落户，在杜拜说英语，有另一套词汇。

例如「双程路」，不是一本正经的叫Dual Carriageway，而是叫Come and Go Road：一条马路上，有来的车，也有往的车，这个Dinglish新名词，其实比正宗的英文更传神。

大城市的「回旋处」，不是香港车主熟知的 Roundabout，而是「圆圈」（Circle）。仔细一想：回旋处当然是圆形的，难道是方的不成？

还有「相似」（Similar）这个字，中东式的英文，叫做Same-same but different──「一样一样，但不一样」，不就是相似的意思吗？

中东天气热，天气热的地方，人就懒洋洋。在杜拜，如果叫一个秘书「今天」把文件打好，不要讲Today──因为在阿拉伯话里，「今天」的意思很抽象，即是「不急，如果你有时间的话，慢慢来，明天后天也不要紧」的意思。叫对方今天把事情做好，要强调「今天本日」（Today itself），按正宗的文法，完全多余，但这是中东，要入乡随俗。

中东式英语有自己的一套逻辑，因为地处赤道，阿拉伯人和印度人从来不戴手套，但他们穿袜子。中东式的英语，没有Gloves这个字，手套就叫做手袜：Handsocks，与广东话相同。

在餐厅里叫一客三文治，不烘底，不叫 Sandwich，而是叫「没煮熟过的多士」（Uncooked Toast）。

去到杜拜，机场、酒店、银行，讲英语的阿拉伯人，都讲这种话，以阿拉伯语或印度语的概念为主体，英文的意思是客，没有什么好自卑的，想一想，其中自有道理。阿拉伯有石油，石油就是金钱，你来赚我的钱，要明白我的另类英语。

此中并无对错，一切只是观点与角度。所谓Chinglish，不是也为英文添了一层姿采吗？例如，安全套，为什么一定是Condom，而不能叫The Security Glove（记住是单数）？正如李约瑟当他知道Cigarette的中文叫做香烟（Fragant Smoke）马上学中文。

NYTimes: Louisiana’s Latest Assault on Darwin

Editorial
Published: June 21, 2008

It comes as no surprise that the Louisiana State Legislature has overwhelmingly approved a bill that seeks to undercut the teaching of evolution in the public schools. The state, after all, has a sorry history as a hotbed of creationists’ efforts to inject religious views into science courses. All that stands in the way of this retrograde step is Gov. Bobby Jindal.

In the 1980s, Louisiana passed an infamous “Creationism Act” that prohibited the teaching of evolution unless it was accompanied by instruction in “creation science.” That effort to gain essentially equal time for creationism was slapped down by the United States Supreme Court as an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. State legislators, mimicking scattered efforts elsewhere, responded with a cagier, indirect approach.

The new bill doesn’t mention either creationism or its close cousin, intelligent design. It explicitly disavows any intent to promote a religious doctrine. It doesn’t try to ban Darwin from the classroom or order schools to do anything. It simply requires the state board of education, if asked by local school districts, to help create an environment that promotes “critical thinking” and “objective discussion” about not only evolution and the origins of life but also about global warming and human cloning, two other bêtes noires of the right. Teachers would be required to teach the standard textbook but could use supplementary materials to critique it.

That may seem harmless. But it would have the pernicious effect of implying that evolution is only weakly supported and that there are valid competing scientific theories when there are not. In school districts foolish enough to head down this path, the students will likely emerge with a shakier understanding of science.

As a biology major at Brown University, Mr. Jindal must know that evolution is the unchallenged central organizing principle for modern biology. As a rising star on the conservative right, mentioned as a possible running mate for John McCain, Mr. Jindal may have more than science on his mind. In a television interview, he seemed to say that local school boards should decide what is taught and that it would be wrong to teach only evolution or only intelligent design.

If Mr. Jindal has the interests of students at heart, the sensible thing is to veto this Trojan horse legislation.

New Scientists: Bad guys really do get the most girls

18 June 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Mason Inman

NICE guys knew it, now two studies have confirmed it: bad boys get the most girls. The finding may help explain why a nasty suite of antisocial personality traits known as the “dark triad” persists in the human population, despite their potentially grave cultural costs.

The traits are the self-obsession of narcissism; the impulsive, thrill-seeking and callous behaviour of psychopaths; and the deceitful and exploitative nature of Machiavellianism. At their extreme, these traits would be highly detrimental for life in traditional human societies. People with these personalities risk being shunned by others and shut out of relationships, leaving them without a mate, hungry and vulnerable to predators.

But being just slightly evil could have an upside: a prolific sex life, says Peter Jonason at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. “We have some evidence that the three traits are really the same thing and may represent a successful evolutionary strategy.”

Jonason and his colleagues subjected 200 college students to personality tests designed to rank them for each of the dark triad traits. They also asked about their attitudes to sexual relationships and about their sex lives, including how many partners they’d had and whether they were seeking brief affairs.

The study found that those who scored higher on the dark triad personality traits tended to have more partners and more desire for short-term relationships, Jonason reported at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting in Kyoto, Japan, earlier this month. But the correlation only held in males.

James Bond epitomises this set of traits, Jonason says. “He’s clearly disagreeable, very extroverted and likes trying new things – killing people, new women.” Just as Bond seduces woman after woman, people with dark triad traits may be more successful with a quantity-style or shotgun approach to reproduction, even if they don’t stick around for parenting. “The strategy seems to have worked. We still have these traits,” Jonason says.

This observation seems to hold across cultures. David Schmitt of Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, presented preliminary results at the same meeting from a survey of more than 35,000 people in 57 countries. He found a similar link between the dark triad and reproductive success in men. “It is universal across cultures for high dark triad scorers to be more active in short-term mating,” Schmitt says. “They are more likely to try and poach other people’s partners for a brief affair.”

Barbara Oakley of Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, says that the studies “verify something a lot of people have conjectured about”.

Christopher von Rueden of the University of California at Santa Barbara says that the studies are important because they confirm that personality variation has direct fitness consequences.

“They still have to explain why it hasn’t spread to everyone,” says Matthew Keller of the University of Colorado in Boulder. “There must be some cost of the traits.” One possibility, both Keller and Jonason suggest, is that the strategy is most successful when dark triad personalities are rare. Otherwise, others would become more wary and guarded.

NYTimes: A Bounty of Midsize Planets Is Reported

By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: June 17, 2008

There is a lot of new territory out there in the cosmos, but nothing you would want to pitch camp on — yet.

About a third of all the Sun-like stars in our galaxy harbor modestly sized planets, according to a study announced Monday by a team of European astronomers.

At a meeting in Nantes, France, Michel Mayor of the Geneva Observatory and his group presented a list of 45 new planets, ranging in mass from slightly bigger than Earth to about twice as massive as Neptune, from a continuing survey of some 200 stars.

All of the planets orbit their stars in 50 days or less, well within the corresponding orbit of Mercury, which takes 88 days to go around the Sun, and well within frying distance of any lifelike creatures.

Among the bounty is a rare triple-planet system of “super-Earths” around the star HD 40307, about 42 light-years away in the constellation Pictor. The planets are roughly four, seven and nine times the mass of Earth and have orbital periods of 4, 10 and 20 days, respectively.

Dr. Mayor called the discoveries “only the tip of the iceberg” in a news release from the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany.

Theories of planet formation, Dr. Mayor said in an e-mail message from Nantes, hold that smaller planets like super-Earths and Neptunes should be numerous. “But evidently it was a nice surprise to see that with our instrument we have the sensitivity to detect that population,” he said.

Astronomers said the new results indicated that when their instruments got sensitive enough to detect even smaller planets, such planets would be there to be found.

Sara Seager, a planetary theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was one of the organizers of the Nantes conference, said in an e-mail message, “We’ve always been hoping that low-mass planets are common — to increase the chance for an Earth analog to exist around a nearby star.”

In a terse statement, Dr. Mayor’s main rivals, a group of planet hunters led by Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said they were doing their own survey, to be completed within a year.

“Our survey will check the Swiss report that 30 percent of stars have super-Earths or Neptunes orbiting closer than Mercury does the Sun,” the group said in an e-mail message.

Dr. Mayor and his team discovered the first so-called exoplanet orbiting a regular star, known as Pegasi 51, in 1995. That planet, about half the mass of Jupiter, circles its star tightly in a four-day orbit. In the years since, some 270 exoplanets have been discovered, many of them like the original, so-called hot Jupiters in lethal scorching embraces of their stars.

Part of the reason that such unusual systems have been found first is that the detection method is biased toward finding large planets close to their stars. Both Dr. Mayor’s and Dr. Marcy’s groups use what is called the wobble method, deducing the presence of a planet by the to-and-fro gravitational tug it gives its star as it orbits. The more massive the planet and the closer it is, the bigger and more noticeable tug it will impart.

The tug perturbs the star’s velocity relative to Earth by as little as a few meters per second in the case of a super-Earth. That shows up as a periodic shift in the wavelength of light from the star.

In recent years, Dr. Mayor’s group has used a special spectrograph known as Harps, for High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, on a telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s site at La Silla, Chile, to detect such small wobbles in stars.

“Detection of planets with masses of about 2 Earth-masses (maybe less!) is possible,” Dr. Mayor said in an e-mail message.

To do much better, astronomers will have to go to space.

About one in 14 stars harbors a massive giant planet like Jupiter or Saturn, Dr. Mayor estimated. If in fact one in three harbors a Neptune or super-Earth, that is an appealing situation for astronomers and others who would like someday to find someplace livable or even someone living Out There.

Dr. Seager compared the quest to a giant Sudoku game. “Every time we fill in a key number,” she said in an e-mail message, “we take a big step towards finishing: finding the habitable planets and understanding how rare or common our solar system actually is.”

陶杰：真ABBA

2008/06/10
苹果日报

除了披头四，解散了的ABBA，是令人怀念的另一缕绝响。

为什么最初诞生在北国雪乡的瑞典，在白皑皑的山峯和森林之间，像阳光一样迸溅出一缕金色的歌声，是一个谜。ABBA的歌不止有磁性，而且有电流，一丛金发把磅礴的情感唱成一个永恒的盛夏，消融了失意的人心头的雪花。

一样是情感的解放，ABBA的音乐是「喜」，披头四是「怒」，比知其实有点「哀」，流行音乐也音分七色，像彩虹一样，回首一个盛唐般的音乐时代，才遗憾昔日五陵少年策马奔驰的乐。ABBA 的音乐如波浪，如山岭，如阳光，如松涛，叫人目迷五音，耳眩七色，ABBA的流行曲像蓝夜星辰的壁画长卷，定义了什么叫做声音。

ABBA解散之后，世界陷入了一个噪音的黑暗时代，直到四个迷恋ABBA的后进，组成「ABBA来了」，把ABBA的歌魂附上躯体。这种乐队，不是翻版，也不是抄袭，而是致敬。

有许多经典，成为创作界的神圣，想致敬也不可以的，例如黑泽明的电影和金庸的小说，但上苍有情，在天才的名单上拨了一个小小的配额供后人仰习，让人模仿他们的呼吸和眼神，像《2百万夺命奇案》的高氏兄弟，多少学到了希治阁失落的神韵，而且还多肉紧三分。有的巨匠可学，像齐白石的水墨虾，就有一个叫娄师白的画家亦画得形神兼备；有的大师不可学，上天派他下凡，短短几十年就收了回去，像莫札特的音乐。

有的在可学和不可学之间，如邓丽君的国语歌。可学，是因为邓丽君柔丽的嗓子在江浙和台湾都不乏这样的温软女子；不可学，是因为邓丽君的性格和身世，在柔弱千蕊之间别有一树烽火般的坚贞。

梅艳芳学法国的Edith Piaf，也学了八九成，只差那么一点点：同是天涯沦落的苦命人，同是不堪回首的前尘心事，只是法国歌后还经历了一场铁蹄焦土的世界大战，梅艳芳的故事却局限在荔园的歌台和香港演艺的江湖，只差那么一点点，就Pay得成Tribute了，后来无人，令人引为长憾。

但是ABBA，像一种把素菜做成肉味、看上去明明像牛排，进口却是斋，是可以学的，因为北欧社会很单纯，原唱人的生活也没有那么多戏剧的冲逆和折击，学ABBA少了一层功夫，就是可以专心学他们的歌，不必学他们的人。所以ABBA Arrival，ABBA来了，正如耶稣末日审判重回人间的Second Coming，让瑞典名乐手的喜歌连同听众的回忆一起复活。

翻版是翻版，另有一种叫做「附体」（Reincarnation），像热恋中的情人，爱他太深，连他托腮的一个小动作，你不知觉也跟着做了，然后，他发现了你的痴狂，然后，大家笑成一团，热恋就是这个样子的，如怨如慕，他就是你，你也是他，缠绵成一缕青烟。