In agrarian(农业的), pre-industrial Europe,“you'd want to wake up early, start working with the sunrise, have a break to have the largest meal, and then you'd go back to work,”says Ken Albala, a professor of history at the University of the Pacific.“Later, at 5 or 6, you'd have a smaller supper.”

    This comfortable cycle, in which the rhythms of the day helped shape the rhythms of the meals, gave rise to the custom of the large midday meal, eaten with the extended family.“Meals are the foundation of the family,”says Carole Couniban, a professor at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, “so there was a very important interconnection between eating together and strengthening family ties.”

    Since industrialization, maintaining such a slow cultural metabolism has been much harder, with the long midday meal shrinking to whatever could be stuffed into a lunch bucket or bought at a food stand. Certainly, there were benefits. Modern techniques for producing and shipping food led to greater variety and quantity, including a tremendous increase in the amount of animal protein and dairy products available, making us more energetic than our ancestors.

    Yet plenty has been lost too, even in cultures that still live to eat. Take Italy. It's no secret that the Mediterranean diet is healthy, but it was also a joy to prepare and eat. Italians, says Counihan, traditionally began the day with a small meal. The big meal came at around 1 p.m. In between the midday meal and a late, smaller dinner came a small snack. Today, when time zones have less and less meaning, there is little tolerance for offices' closing for lunch, and worsening traffic in cities means workers can't make it home and back fast enough anyway. So the formerly small supper after sundown becomes the big meal of the day, the only one at which the family has a chance to get together.“The evening meal carries the full burden that used to be spread over two meals,”says Counihan.

    A man walked into a small Irish pub and ordered three beers. Bartender was surprised, but he served that man three beers. One hour later the man ordered three beers again. The very next day that man ordered three beers again and drank quietly at a table. This repeated several times and shortly after the people of the town were whispering about the man, who was ordering three beers at once.

    A couple of weeks later, the bartender decided to clear this out and inquired: “I do not want to pry, but could you explain, why do you order three beers all the time?” The man replied: “It seems strange, isn't it? You see, my two brothers live abroad at the moment, one – in France and another – in Italy. We have made an agreement, that every time we go to pub each of us will order extra two beers and it will help keeping up the family bond”.

    Soon all the town have heard about the man's answer and liked it a lot. The man became a local celebrity. Residents of the town were telling this story to newcomers or tourists and even invited them to that pub to look at Three Beer Man.

    However, one day the man came to pub and ordered only two beers, not three as usual. The bartender served him with bad feeling. All that evening the man ordered and drank only two beers. The very next day all the town was talking about this news, some people pray for the soul of one of the brothers, others quietly grieve.

    When the man came to pub the next time and ordered two beers again, the bartender asked him: “I would like to offer condolences to you, due to the death of your dear brother”. The man considered this for a moment and then replied: “Oh, you are probably surprised that I order only two beers now? Well, my two brothers are alive and well. It's just because of my decision. I promised myself to give up drinking.”

    Watching a 3D movie can more than double the concentration powers and cognitive(认知) processing of children, a new research claims.

    A study made by visual technology firm RealD and led by child psychologist Dr. Richard Woolfson suggests that children aged between 7 and 14 experienced twice the cognitive processing speed and performed better in testing after watching 20 minutes of a 3D film. This is despite suggestions that attention spans(时期) in children have shortened in the last decade due to unlimited to access to entertainment, including on-demand TV, gaming and social media. A 2015 study claimed that watching 3D content had a similar effect to brain-training exercises.

    Consumer psychologist Mr. Fagan said that the increased stimulation(刺激) found in watching something in 3D "exercised" the brain and improved performance in the short term. "3D films can play the role of ‘brain-training' games and help to make children ‘smarter' in the short term," he said. "The shortening of response times after watching 3D was almost three times as big as that gained from watching 2D; in other words, 3D helps children process aspects of their environment more quickly. This is likely to be because 3D is a mentally stimulating experience which ‘gets the brain's juices flowing'."

    The experiment saw children given a range of cognitive tests before watching 20 minutes of a movie in either 2D or 3D and being tested again. The results showed those who saw the 3D content reacted faster and performed bettering the second round of testing. Mental engagement also rose by 13% among 3D watchers. Child psychologist Dr. Woolfson added that “supportive parenting” and regularly listening to classical music can also aid a child's memory.

    In his research work, Philosophical Investigations（哲学调查）, Ludwig Wittgenstein tries to clarify（澄清）some of the problems in people's thinking about how the mind works.

    Imagine, he says, that everyone has a small box in which they keep a beetle（甲壳虫）. No one is allowed to look in anyone else's box, only in their own. Over time, people talk about what is in their boxes and the word “beetle” comes to stand for what is in everyone's box. Through this example, Wittgenstein point out that the beetle is very much like an individual's（个体的）mind; no one can know exactly what it is like to be another person or experience things from another's point of view—look in someone else's “box”—but it is general considered that the mental working of another person's mind is very similar to that of our own. However, it does not really matter—he argues—what is in the box or whether everyone indeed has a beetle, since there is no way of checking or comparing. In a sense, the word “beetle” simply means “what is in the box”. From this point of view, the mind is simply “what is in the box”, or rather “what is in your head”.

    Wittgenstein considers language to have meaning because of public usage. In other words, when we talk of having a mind—or a beetle—we are using a term that we have learned through conversation. The concept might be perceived（感知）differently in each of our minds, so the word “mind” cannot be used to refer specifically to some entity（本质）outside of our own conception（概念）, since we cannot see into other people's boxes.

    Little New Year (Chinese: Xiaonian), usually a week before the lunar New Year, falls on Feb 8 this year. It is also known as the Festival of the Kitchen God, the deity(神) who oversees the moral character of each household. Here are six things you should know about the Little New Year, another sign of the start of spring.

    ⒈Offer sacrifices to Kitchen God

    One of the most distinctive traditions of the Little New Year is the burning of a paper image of the Kitchen God, who will report on the family's conduct over the past year. The offerings to the Kitchen God include pig's head, fish, sweet bean paste, melons, fruit, boiled dumplings, barley sugar, and Guandong candy, a sticky treat made out of glutinous millet and sprouted wheat. Most of the offerings are sweets of various varieties. It is thought that this will seal the Kitchen God's mouth and encourage him to only say good things about the family when he ascends to heaven to make his report.

    ⒉House cleaning

    According to Chinese folk beliefs, during the last month of the year ghosts and deities must choose either to return to Heaven or to stay on Earth. It is believed that in order to ensure the ghosts and deities' timely departure people must thoroughly clean both their persons and their houses, down to every last drawer and cupboard.

    ⒊Eat Guandong candy

    Guandong candy, a sticky treat made out of glutinous millet and sprouted wheat, is a traditional snack that Chinese people eat on the Festival of the Kitchen God.

    ⒋Paste paper-cuts to windows

    In the Little New Year, old couplets and paper-cuts from the previous Spring Festival are taken down, and new window decorations, New Year's posters, and auspicious(吉利的) decorations are pasted up.

    ⒌Bath and hair-cut

    As the old Chinese saying goes, whether they're rich or poor, people often have a haircut before the Spring Festival. The activity of taking bath and haircut is often taken on the Little New Year.

    ⒍Preparations for Spring Festival

    People start to stock up necessary provisions for the Spring Festival since the Little New Year. Everything needed to make offerings to the ancestors, entertain guests, and feed the family over the long holiday must be purchased in advance.

    Is Paperless Office Really Paperless?

    A rising economy increased paper sales by 6 to 7 percent each year in the early to mid-1990s, and the convenience of desktop printing allowed office workers to indulge anything and everything. In 2004, Ms. Dunn, a communications supplies director, said that plain white office paper would see less than a 4 percent growth rate, a primary reason for which is that some 47 percent of the workforce entered the job market after computers had already been introduced to offices.

    For office innovators, the dream of paperless office is an example of high-tech arrogance（傲慢）. Today's office service is overwhelmed By more newspapers than ever before. After decades of development, the American government can finally get rid of the madness on paper. In the past, the demand for paper has been far ahead of growth in the American economy, but the sales have slowed markedly over the past two to three years, despite the good economic conditions.

    “Old habits are hard to break,” says Ms. Dunn. “There are some functions that paper serves where a screen display doesn't work. Those functions are both its strength and its weakness.” Analysts attribute the decline to such factors as advances in digital databases and communication systems. Escaping our craving for paper, however, will be anything but an easy affair.

    “We're finally seeing a reduction in the amount of paper being used per worker in the workplace,” says John Maine, vice president of a paper economic consulting firm. “More information is being transmitted electronically, and an increasing number of people are satisfied that information exists only in electronic form without printing multiple backups.”

    To reduce paper use, some companies are working to combine digital and paper capabilities. For example, Xerox is developing electronic paper: thin digital displays that respond to a stylus, like a pen on paper. Marks can be erased or saved digitally. Even with such technological advances, the increasing amounts of electronic data necessarily require more paper.

    “The information industry today is composed of a thin paper crust surrounding an electronic core,” Mr. Saffo wrote. The growing paper crust is most noticeable, but the hidden electronic core is far larger and growing more rapidly. The result is that we are becoming paperless, but we hardly notice at all. “That's one of the greatest ironies of the information age,” Saffo says. “It's just common sense that the more you talk to someone by phone or computer, it inevitably leads to a face-to-face meeting. The best thing for the aviation industry was the Internet.”