What if you arrived home to find it delicious hot meal waiting for you, prepared by your very own kitchen robot? It might sound like science fiction. but professors at the university of Tokyo  have  taken  the first steps toward making that  scenario a reality. The team recently introduced a humanoid kitchen robot that can pour and other drinks into cups and serve the m to guests. When teating is over, the robot can also wash the dishes and put them away.

    In California, another interesting kitchen robot has been developed, called Readybot. It can pick up objects and either store them in  cabinets (橱柜）or put them in the trash. It also carries a separate floor-cleaning robot that can operate by itself. Unlike the Japanese robot, Readybot just looks more like a large box with arms and wheels.

    Readybot was created by engineers and designers who established a club called the Readybot  Challlenge. They believe that in the future millions of robots will be needed in homes to perform ordinary household tasks. Readybot is just the first step in their plan to create a robot that can do jobs not  only  in  kitchens but  in other rooms of homes and in offices as well.

    Clearly there are technological difficulties to solve before robots can cook a Complete dinner, and there arc also many safety concerns (忧虑） .Not everyone (especially parents) would be comfortable with the idea of robots in their house, manipulating hot pans and sharp knives. The European Commission recently funded(资助） a project to study these concerns. According to lead researcher Professor Chris Melhuish,“ Enabling  robots to work  safely with humans is a key need for the future development of robotics.”

    One fine afternoon I was walking along Fifth Avenue when I remembered that it was necessary to buy a pair of socks. I turned into the first sock shop that caught my eye, and a boy clerk who could not have been more than 17 years old came forward.

    “What can I do for you, sir?”

    “I wish to buy a pair of socks.”

    His eyes glowed. “Did you know that you had come into the best place in the world to buy socks?” I had not been aware of that.

    “Come with me,” said the boy happily. He began to haul (用力拖) down from the shelves box after box.

    “Hold on, boy, I am going to buy only one pair!”

    “I know that,” said he, “but I want you to see how beautiful these are. Aren't they wonderful?” There was on his face an expression of joy, as if he were showing to me the mysteries of his religion.

    “My friend,” said I, “if this is not just the enthusiasm (热情) that comes from novelty (新鲜), if you can keep up this day after day, in ten years you will own every sock in the United States.”

    In many shops the customer has to wait for someone to serve him. And when finally some clerk does notice you, you are made to feel as if you were disturbing him. He displays no interest either in you or in the goods he is paid to sell.

    Yet possibly that very clerk who is now so cold began his career with enthusiasm. As time goes by, the enthusiasm is gradually gone; his only pleasures were found outside of working hours. He became a mechanical (机械的), not inspired, salesman.

    I have observed such change in the lives of so many people in so many occupations that I have come to the conclusion that the fastest road to failure is to do things mechanically.

    Both are so much related to each other. And both are so dissimilar! What are the differences between friendship and love? Is platonic (理想的) friendship possible between persons of opposite sex? Let us try and understand.

    What is friendship? Why do we call a person our friend? When do we call someone a very good friend? If we care for a person, if we are always ready to help that person and if we share most of our thoughts with a person, they are our good friends. We can always count upon our good friends in an emergency. We are always sure that our friend will understand why we acted in a certain way. We need not explain anything to our very good friends. The friendship is so deep and the relationship is so close.

    What about love? In a relationship of deep love, all the sharing that we discussed above are taken for granted. But love transcends (胜过) all this. During love, we are attached with a particular person, while in friendship, one may have many friends. A loving relationship makes one so much attached to the other, that one gets pained if his/her beloved is hurt! Love also involves a physical element. Friendship does not have that. This is a vital difference. Nature gives us love but does not give us friendship.

    Your heart beats will never increase in expectation of meeting your friend. You will not lie awake at night thinking about your friend. You will not feel totally lost, if you don't meet your friend for a few days. You will not have dreams in your eyes thinking about your friend. But in love, you will do all this and much more. Indeed, there is no comparison between love and friendship.

    This past Christmas season, I went to visit my parents. During the visit, I found the letters written by my parents to each other during the war in the attic (阁楼). The letters were piled high, dirty and had not been touched for decades. I asked mother and father if I could take the letters back to my home. They agreed.

    As I opened each letter, all of them beautiful with age, I discovered a new page in this private part of my parents' lives. My father served in the army. His letters were full of frontline (前线) descriptions, and they continued all the way through the battle. Each of my mother's letters was sealed (密封) with her lipstick kiss. Father wrote that he sealed his return letters by rekissing her lipstick kiss. How they had been missing each other! I finished reading six months of the letters and discovered there were at least eleven months missing. Maybe they were lost forever.

    Not long after our Christmas visit, Father became very ill and was in hospital. I went to the hospital to see him. As I sat by his bedside, he told me how much receiving those lipstick-kissed letters had meant to him when he had been so far from home.

    Later that evening, Mother and I revisited the attic in search of the lost letters. Finally we dug them out of Mother's old college trunk (皮箱). The next day was Valentine's Day, and we went to the hospital. At my father's bedside, I showed him an old envelope. His curiosity was aroused. When he carefully opened the letter, he recognized it and his eyes were filled with tears. He read the love messages that had been delivered years before to my mother in a quavery (颤抖的) voice. This Valentine's Day, we were lucky that we had everything.

    A farmer had a cow, and he took very good care of the cow. One day when the cow was ill, he was very worried. He telephoned the vet.

    "What's the problem?" the vet asked the farmer when he arrived.

    "My cow's ill," the farmer said. "I don't know what's the matter with her. She's just lying down and doesn't eat anything. She's making a strange noise."

    The vet examined the cow and said, "She's certainly ill, and she needs to take some very strong medicine."

    He took a bottle out of his box, put two pills into the farmer's hand and said, "The pills should make her feel better."

    "How can she take these pills?" the farmer asked.

    The vet gave him a tube(管子) and said, "Put this tube in her mouth, and then put the pills in the tube and blow(吹气) into the cow's mouth. That will make it."

    The next day the vet came to the farm again. The farmer was sitting outside his house and looked more worried.

    "How is your cow?" the vet asked.

    "Not better," the farmer said, "and I'm feeling very strange myself."

    "Oh?" the vet asked. "Why?"

    "I did what you said," the farmer answered. "I put the tube in the cow's mouth and then put the two pills in the tube."

    "And?" the vet asked.

    "The cow blew first," the farmer said.

    Apple and Microsoft each launched new products. One company astonished everyone. The other made people sleepy. Can you guess which was which? You probably guessed wrong. Because Apple, famous for its creative products, was the tech giant whose new product caused a collective shrug. While Microsoft, which stole a move out of the Apple Playbook, won cheers from high-end, creative-class consumers like business analysts, media designers and music producers.

    As Hayley Tsukayama remarked at The Washington Post, the Surface Studio, one of Microsoft's new products, is really just a super-sized version of the Surface Books product that Microsoft has been selling for years. But if you've ever watched science fiction movies like Minority Report-- where Tom Cruise seems to operate pictures and data hanging on mid-air by touching them, spreading his fingers to increase on details, and sending files and information sliding from one folder to another with a click of the finger, you can see how Microsoft is trying to show the same experience.

    Meanwhile, apple's new products were almost like some fine promotions for its Apple TV. They boast that the new Macbook Pro has a smaller size and more functions, and a new touch screen bar on laptop keyboards where function keys used to be.

    So what's going on? In many ways, Apple is focusing on attracting the average consumers who have been attracted by Microsoft. And Microsoft is focusing on targeting the high-end professionals Apple has historically been associated with. You can even see this is the companies' ad campaigns: Microsoft's ads stress imagination and creativity, while Apple's commercial chief performance and convenience of its Macbooks.

    So Apple is trying to control the world of devices and laptops from the top down, starting with the high-end market and moving on to appeal to a broader base of consumers. Microsoft, having already strengthened itself within the bigger low-end market, is now attempting the opposite with a bottom-up strategy. Will they succeed? Time will tell...