Dear Seth,

    You're only three years old, and at this point in your life you can't read, much less understand what I'm going to try to tell you in this letter. But I've been thinking a lot about the life that you have ahead of you, about my life so far as I reflect on what I've learned, and about my role as a dad in trying to prepare you for the trials that you will face in the coming years.

    You won't be able to understand this letter today, but someday, when you're ready, I hope you will find some wisdom and value in what I share with you.

    You are young, and life has yet to take its toll on you, to throw disappointments and heartaches and loneliness and struggles and pain into your path. You have not been worn down yet by long hours of thankless work, by the slings and arrows of everyday life.

    For this, be thankful. You are at a wonderful stage of life. You have many wonderful stages of life still to come, but they are not without their costs and perils.

    I hope to help you along your path by sharing some of the best of what I've learned. As with any advice, take it with a grain of salt. What works for me might not work for you.

    Life Can Be Cruel

    There will be people in your life who won't be very nice. They'll tease you because you're different, or for no good reason. They might try to bully you or hurt you.

    There's not much you can do about these people except to learn to deal with them, and learn to choose friends who are kind to you, who actually care about you, who make you feel good about yourself. When you find friends like this, hold on to them, treasure them, spend time with them, be kind to them, love them.

    There will be times when you are met with disappointment instead of success. Life won't always turn out the way you want. This is just another thing you'll have to learn to deal with. But instead of letting these things get you down, push on. Accept disappointment and learn to persevere, to pursue your dreams despite pitfalls. Learn to turn negatives into positives, and you'll do much better in life.

    You will also face heartbreak and abandonment by those you love. I hope you don't have to face this too much, but it happens. Again, not much you can do but to heal, and to move on with your life. Let these pains become stepping stones to better things in life, and learn to use them to make you stronger.

    But Be Open to life Anyway

    Yes, you'll find cruelty and suffering in your journey through life … but don't let that close you to new things. Don't retreat from life, don't hide or wall yourself off. Be open to new things, new experiences, new people.

    You might get your heart broken 10 times, but find the most wonderful woman the 11th time. If you shut yourself off from love, you'll miss out on that woman, and the happiest times of your life.

 You might get teased and bullied and hurt by people you meet … and then after meeting dozens of jerks, find a true friend. If you close yourself off to new people, and don't open your heart to them, you'll avoid pain … but also lose out on meeting some incredible people, who will be there during the toughest times of your life and create some of the best times of your life.

    You will fail many times but if you allow that to stop you from trying, you will miss out on the amazing feeling of success once you reach new heights with your accomplishments. Failure is a stepping stone to success.

    Life Isn't a Competition .You will meet many people who will try to outdo you, in school, in college, at work. They'll try to have nicer cars, bigger houses, nicer clothes, cooler gadgets. To them, life is a competition — they have to do better than their peers to be happy.

    Here's a secret: Life isn't a competition. It's a journey. If you spend that journey always trying to impress others, to outdo others, you're wasting your journey. Instead, learn to enjoy the journey. Make it a journey of happiness, of constant learning, of continual improvement, of love.

    Don't worry about having a nicer car or house or anything material, or even a better-paying job. None of that matters a whit, and none of it will make you happier. You'll acquire these things and then only want more. Instead, learn to be satisfied with having enough — and then use the time you would have wasted trying to earn money to buy those things … use that time doing things you love.

    Finally, know that I love you and always will. You are starting out on a weird, scary, daunting, but ultimately incredibly wonderful journey, and I will be there for you when I can. Godspeed.

Love,

Your Dad

    You may think that light pollution isn't something extraordinarily important. You may believe that every other type of pollution has a larger impact on the environment that light pollution does. But light pollution is serious.

    Light pollution, or “sky glow”, is the glow you can see at night above cities and towns. Light pollution is a problem that has been accompanying man ever since he started his first fire some 15,000 years ago. Light pollution is the light that comes from streetlights, buildings, parking lots and any other source of light that is reflected or directed into the atmosphere.

    Urban light pollution means that one-fifth of the world's population can no longer see the Milky Way(银河) with the naked eye(肉眼). Many city kids, even if they did look through the orange smog above their heads, would probably see only a handful of stars. We have lost our view of the stars, and we have mucked up our  night-time environment as well. Astronomers are calling for the dark places on Earth to be preserved as national parks.

    Lots of people find the ever-brightening night annoying, and animals that are programmed to prefer the dark may avoid a brightened habitat. Sea turtles can get lost searching for a beach to lay eggs, and their hatchlings(孵化的幼仔)may confuse over-lit beachfront resorts(度假胜地) for the ocean horizon, wasting precious energy needed to find the sea and escape predators(食肉动物). Because their necks aren't yet long enough to see things far away, baby turtles rely on the mirror image of the moon to guide them to the sea, to begin their new life. A car may even hit a particular turtle, which was thinking the light from a nearby city was moonlight reflecting off the ocean waves. Birds that live in and around cities can die because of sky glow, too. The bright lights can blind them, leading to countless collisions with buildings and other tall structures.

    On an individual level, people can help reduce much sky glow by using lighting only when necessary. The stars above us are priceless heritage— for not only for astronomers but for all humans. More of our children should be able to look up at night and see the Milk Way.

    What is success? I am not going to try to explain success. I think a precise meaning is impossible! Is it winning a Gold Medal at the Olympic Games or winning Wimbledon, or being awarded a Nobel Prize? What else? I believe personal success could be anything at all- it does not have to involve public recognition. Who is more successful? A millionaire who is unhappy, or an unnoticed person, who has led a simple, quiet, sincere and happy life? The simplest definition of success, I think, is “to set out to do something and to succeed in doing it.

    The first step on the road to success starts with belief. Believe you can succeed and you will. Achieving success in whatever endeavor(努力)you choose may be the goal of life; because it gives you freedom from worry. Could that be?

    Success means different things to every one of us. Some people believe it is measured in financial term; others believe it is helping others rather than helping themselves. However, most people are motivated to a great extend by public recognition. How many people are really happy? How many people are really doing what they want to with their lives? Incidentally, to imagine makes us different from animals.

    Most important of all, I believe success is a matter of personal growth. If every day you are developing or growing just a millimeter, I believe one is successful. Just being a slightly better person each day for me is success. I've got a very long way to go them!

    Finally, always remember success is a process and is not simply a matter of arriving at a destination. It's the journey that really matters. Success is what you become in the often very difficult and dangerous journey down the river of life.

    Every day I see advertisements in the newspapers and on the buses claiming that it is easy and quick to learn English. There is even a reference to William Shakespeare or Charles Dickens to encourage learners even more. When I see advertisements like this, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. But many people must believe these ridiculous claims, or else the advertisements would not appear.

    Of course it is clear that students who go to England to learn English have a great advantage over others, but too many cannot afford to do so. Some go to the opposite extreme and think they can teach themselves at home with dictionaries. But it is wrong to assume that each word in English has a precise equivalent in another language, let alone produces good pronunciation and intonation.

    Most teaching is still based on behaviorist psychology. Behaviorists are fond of making students repeat phrases and making sentences. If we were parrots or chimpanzees, these methods might be successful. A large number of theorists seem to think it is a pity we aren't, because it would make it easier to use their methods.

    In my personal opinion, no one can ever learn to speak English or any other language unless he is interested in it. Human beings, unlike parrots and chimpanzees, do not like making noises unless they understand what the noises mean and can relate them to their own lives. It is worth remembering that language is a means of communication. What they listen to and read cannot be a formula. It must be real.

    There is another relevant point worth mentioning here. We need other people to talk to and listen to when we communicate. They can work with us and practice the unfamiliar forms with us in real situations, talking to each other about real life language.

    October might seem to be pumpkin month in the U.S. The holiday of Halloween (万圣节) comes on October 31. Americans around the country are already using social media to show off their pumpkin growing and carving skills.

    Pumpkins are round, orange fruits related to squashes (南瓜小果) and gourds (葫芦). People use their flesh and seeds for food, but they are also popular decorations in the fall.

    Two big pumpkins recently made headlines in the U.S. A farmer in the northeastern state of Rhode Island broke the record for the largest pumpkin ever grown in North America. Richard Wallace's pumpkin weighed 1,026 kilograms. It broke his son's record from 2015. Ron Wallace's pumpkin only weighed 1,011 kilograms last year. A schoolteacher in the northwestern state of Washington brought her large pumpkin to an event in California. Her pumpkin was the champion, weighing 866 kilograms. It turns out that Cindy Tobeck's pumpkin grew from one of the seeds from Ron Wallace's pumpkin from 2015.

    While those pumpkins are large, they are still not the largest in the world. According to the website BigPumpkins.com, Richard Wallace's pumpkin is only the second-heaviest pumpkin of the year. A man in Belgium produced a pumpkin that weighed almost 1,200 kilograms. Smithsonian magazine wrote a story about people who try to grow large pumpkins. In 35 years, the size of record pumpkins has grown from about 225 kilograms to over 1,000 kilograms. Pumpkin farmers trying to grow record fruits are taking the seeds of champion pumpkins from one year and breeding them with other large pumpkins.

    But people are not just growing pumpkins. They are carving them, too. One Twitter user from Britain recently posted a photo of a pumpkin designed to look like U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump. No word of a Hillary Clinton pumpkin design. But one pumpkin farmer in California allows visitors to shoot small pumpkins out of a cannon（大炮）. The targets? Large paper cut-outs of both Trump and Clinton.

PhoneSoap: Charge and Clean Your Phone

    You may charge your phone every day, but do you clean your phone as much? Whatever your hands touch, your phones touch. It has been discovered that some phones have 18 times more bacteria and viruses than any surface in a public restroom. So it probably won't surprise you that a 2011 University of London study found that one in six of our phones have bacteria and viruses on them—specifically, the bacteria called E.coli.

    The research on bacteria and viruses led to the invention of PhoneSoap. It is not actually liquid like dishwasher soap. It is a phone charger that uses the electromagnetic radiation used in hospitals to kill 99.9 percent of bacteria and viruses, cleaning your phone while it charges.

    "There are really certain types of bacteria and viruses that we should not be in touch with, and they are really on our phones," says Wes Barnes, the PhoneSoap co-founder. It all started while his cousin and co-founder, Dan LaPorte, was in his cancer research lab at college. "He realized he got the idea of getting rid of bacteria and viruses on the phones," said Barnes. "In the lab they used UV-C light for destroying them. He realized this would be the fastest, most powerful way to kill any bacteria and viruses living on electronic machines."

    PhoneSoap looks like a little metal suitcase. Your phone rests in to charge and get cleaned at the same time. Instead of plugging your phone into the wall, you'd plug it into the PhoneSoap charger box. The process only takes a few minutes but, Barnes says, "The idea is that you can leave it in there overnight if you want to keep charging. Reflective paint keeps the light completely around the phone so it cleans the phone fully."

    The co-founders spent 2013 finding the right companies and they started shipping the product in late November. By last week's International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, PhoneSoap was all grown-up. Both co-founders have left their previous jobs and are selling PhoneSoap nonstop. "We're shipping almost more than we can handle each day," Barnes says. "It's been a great adventure."