When Charles Lee handed me the small red notebook in 1974, he changed my life. “While you are traveling, you should keep notes of things you see and do,” he explained.

    I was 20 years old, a junior in college, spending a term at the University of London. Charles was a retired traveling salesman. I was staying with him in his cottage in Kendal, located in the Lake District of northern England. It was a one-week homestay the university arranged for us before classes began.

    I took his advice. I wrote in the notebook every day during the homestay. Back in London, I recorded weekend trips to Wales, Yorkshire, France, and Spain. I commented on my classes, professors, and classmates. I contrasted my life at a small college in the US with my wandering through the streets of London, my introduction to life in a big city, and my initial travels outside the US. I tracked ideas I had about my life and my future.

    When I wrote in the notebook, I struggled with a sense of my audience and purpose. Who would read this? Were these writings just for me, or did I want others to read them? Was I recording events and ideas just as a prompt(提示) to memory, or was there some larger purpose for this daily exercise?

    I knew I was recording events, thoughts, words that were important to my life. I imagined a future me sitting down to read the pages. I wondered what it would feel like to read those words later. I wondered where I would be and what my life would be like.

    I filled the notebook Charles gave me. I bought a new one and filled it. Then another and another. I continued writing in notebooks for four decades. By that time, they filled two boxes in my garage.

    I had reread some of the journals. Specific volumes had provided me with the background I needed for dozens of articles for magazines. But I had never read them all. Recently, I decided to bring my collection of notebooks into my office and replay my life. As I opened the first box, I suddenly became nervous would I like the former me described on those pages? There was a risk in opening that first notebook. I did it anyway.

    Charles had been right. I remembered the big events and the central happenings, but on each page were many details I hadn't retained(保留).

    The pages revealed highlights from college classes and stories about roommates and friends. I read anxious comments I'd written as I'd launched my teaching career, learned to write lesson plants, assigned grades for student work, and solved discipline problems. I reflected on my coming marriage, then the wedding, and eventually the proud moments when I held each of my three girls as a father. I recounted more trips—returning to Europe, teaching in South America, going on safari(游猎) in Africa, and exploring Greenland. I relived memories of trails hit, rivers crossed, and mountains climbed.

    The writings in those journals framed my life. I hadn't written every day. I often skipped a few days or even weeks, but I always picked up the writing when it felt important. Journals went with me when I traveled, and I often wrote in them at school when my own students were writing.

    It took several long evenings to read through the notebooks, taking me on tour spanning(持续) 42 years. As I read I could recall sitting on a bench in Trafalgar Square in London or in our apartment in Peru to write to the future me. It was then that I realized: I am now the person I was writing to throughout those years.

English Conversation

Leader: Mandi Ashmore

english@ iwc-lausanne. org

    We meet on Mondays at 14：30 at the IWC clubhouse. We chat for about an hour and discuss everything. Mandi asks “students” to contact her on Monday to confirm the class as sometimes she needs to cancel for various reasons or occasionally she may choose to hold the class at a different venue(举办地点) or at an earlier time for us to be able to have lunch together.

French Conversation, Advanced Beginner

Leader: Marielle Sulmoni

frenchconvo@ iwc-lausanne. org

    I'm French (born in Bordeaux) and Swiss by marriage. I hold an advanced beginners' French conversation class on Tuesday afternoons from 14：30 - 16：00. We meet weekly at the clubhouse in a friendly atmosphere. I hope to help you use your knowledge of French, allowing you to speak with no fear of making mistakes, which in time will become fewer and fewer.

French Language Lab, Beginner

Leader: Maija Remlinger

frenchlab@ iwc-lausanne. org

    The group meets on Thursday afternoons from 15：00－16：30 at the clubhouse. The first half of the class is devoted to reading out loud from the book “Easy French Reader”, working on pronunciation and phrasing. During the second half, we listen to audio recordings from “New French with Ease” and work on oral comprehension.

French Conversation, Advanced

Leader: Juliette Brull

french@ iwc-lausanne, org

    We meet every Tuesday at the IWC clubhouse from 9：30－11：00. Most of our time is devoted to very lively discussions about current events and various topics. We also read a book written by a French author and sometimes we see a French movie.

It is hardly surprising that clothing manufacturers(生产商) follow certain uniform standards for different features of clothes. What seems strange, however, is that the standard used for women is the opposite of the one for men. Take a look at the way your clothes button. Men's clothes tend to button from the right, and women's from the left. Considering most of the world's population—men and women—are right-handed, the men's standard would appear to make more sense（更有道理） for women. So why do women's clothes button from the left?

    History really seems to matter here. Buttons first appeared only on the clothes of the rich in the 17th century, when rich women were dressed by servants. For the mostly right-handed servants, having women's shirts button from the left would be easier. On the other hand, having men's shirts button from the right made sense, too. Most men dressed themselves, and a sword（剑） drawn from the left with the right hand would be less likely to get caught in the shirt.

    Today women are seldom dressed by servants, but buttoning from the left is still the standard for them. Is it interesting? Actually, a standard, once it is set, resists change. At a time when all women's shirts buttoned from the left, it would have been risky for any single manufacturer to offer women's shirts that buttoned from the right. After all, women had grown so used to shirts which buttoned from the left and would have to develop new habits and skills to switch. Besides, some women might have found it socially awkward to appear in public wearing shirts that buttoned from the right, since anyone who noticed that would believe they were wearing men's shirts.

    A few days ago my wife sent me out to buy something. When I came home, I handed her a paper bag and said, "Here are the apples you wanted." She looked in the bag, and then she looked at me. "I told you," she said slowly, "to buy some eggs."

    I felt worried about my absent-mindedness (心不在焉，健忘) , so I went to see a doctor. He was a very kind man. "I have seen many people like you. It's nothing to worry about," he said. "If you know you are absent-minded, you are all right. But if you do not know you're absent-minded, you may be really in trouble."

    "Many famous people were absent-minded," the doctor told me. "Thomas Edison was standing in line one day to pay his taxes. When he arrived at the window, he found that he had forgotten his own name. He had to ask the man who was behind him to tell him who he was."

    I felt much better and got up to leave. "Thank you, doctor," I said. "How much do I have to pay you?"

    "Ten dollars for the check-up," the doctor said.

    "But doctor, I did not have a check-up!"

    For a moment the doctor looked puzzled. Then he said, "Oh, yes, it was the patient before you who had a check-up. How absent-minded I am!"

    Recently, many e-commerce platforms, including Didi Taxi, Ctrip, Fliggy, JD ad Taobao, have been uncovered that they are cheating their frequent customers. Their ways are pretty clever. When there are new users or conservative old users, they will give a quite appealing price to attract them into registering and buying goods. However, their big data is not that friendly to the stable users and frequent visitors. The system always offers them higher price for the same products or service. How does this happen? According to the data analysis, the system knows clearly that although they feel the price is high, they will finally pay the bill. By collecting and analyzing users' profiles, buying habits and other information, big data recommends the same products to different users with different prices.

Companies also try other ways to make money, making online consumption far more worrying. For example, video websites always offer 120 seconds' advertisements, which drives people crazy. And even if you pay for the membership to get rid of the ads, you have to “enjoy” 15-second “private” ads. By broadcasting them, companies make huge profits — second to the membership fees. Also, owning 100Mbps network, you still put up with the slow speed when you are downloading a song. You have no choice but to become a VIP when you seek high quality services. Users seem to be lambs(羊羔) among wolves. Even though they say,” Since you have money, I'll charge you more”, we can't do anything about it.

    It pains us that we haven't figured out a way to deal with the problem. The only thing we can do is replacing our iPhones with Android phones if we want to buy a membership card, and applying for new accounts if we want cheaper hotels. Not finding a way to fight back, we can't do anything but accept them passively.

    A team of engineers at Harvard University in trying to create the first robotic fly. Designed to do what a fly does naturally, the tiny is the size of a fat housefly. Its mini wings allow it to stay in the air and perform controlled flight tasks.

    "The added difficulty with a project like this is that actually none of its components is off the shelf and so we have to develop them all on our own' said Robert Wood, a Harvard engineering professor.

    They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. "The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has a number of interdependencies (相互依赖）on the individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, but then has to be matched well to everything it d connected to," said Wood.

    While this first robotic flyer is linked to a small, off-board power source, the goal is eventually to equip it with a built-in power source, so that it might someday perform data-gathering work at rescue sites, in farmers' fields or on the battlefield. "Basically it should be able to take off, land and fly around," he said.

    Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect-scale. Yet, the power, sensing and computation technologies on board could have much broader applications." You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animal, but using these robots instead" he said. "So there are a lot of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day-to-day basis."