Do you want to have a nice place to spend your weekend？Here are some places for you ,which are probably a mere walk away from your college.

King's Art Centre

    A day at the Centre could mean a visit to an exhibition of the work of one of the most interesting contemporary artists on show anywhere. This weekend sees the opening of an exhibition of four local artists.

    You could attend a class teaching you how to 'learn from the masters' or get more creative with paint—free of charge.

    The Centre also runs two life drawing classes for which there is a small fee.

The Botanic Garden

    The Garden has over 8,000 plant species；it holds the research and teaching collection of living plants for Cambridge University.

    The multi­branched Torch Aloe here is impressive. The African plant produces red flowers above blue­green leaves，and is not one to miss.

    Get to the display house to see Dionaea muscipula，a plant more commonly known as the Venus Flytrap that feeds on insects and other small animals.

    The Garden is also a place for wildlife ­enthusiasts. Look for grass snakes in the lake. A snake called 'Hissing Sid' is regularly seen lying in the heat of the warm sun.

Byron's Pool

    Many stories surround Lord Byron's time as a student of Cambridge University. Arriving in 1805，he wrote a letter complaining that it was a place of “mess and drunkenness”．However，it seems as though Byron did manage to pass the time pleasantly enough. I'm not just talking about the pet bear he kept in his rooms.He spent a great deal of time walking in the village.

    It is also said that on occasion Byron swam naked by moonlight in the lake，which is now known as Byron's Pool. A couple of miles past Grantchester in the south Cambridgeshire countryside，the pool is surrounded by beautiful circular paths around the fields. The cries of invisible birds make the trip a lovely experience and on the way home you can drop into the village for afternoon tea. If you don't trust me，then perhaps you'll take it from Virginia Woolf—over a century after Byron，she reportedly took a trip to swim in the same pool.

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    The clearing of my parents' home has made me think about the importance, even centrality of books to the house's life and soul. The house, and our lives in it, would not have been the same without books. The force of the statement comes home to me as I see what happens when shelves are emptied. The rooms suddenly look uncomfortably bare.

    I always rather took it for granted that books furnished a room. The only rooms in our house without books were the dining-room and the bathrooms. Otherwise there were books everywhere: in all the bedrooms, in the drawing-room and in the piano room which became my parents' comfortable winter study.

    I couldn't help feeling that books were rather like people: some more formal and boring, others more entertaining; some simply for show, others with unpromising outsides but rich interiors. They did more, in fact, than furnish a room; they were companions who could offer insights, good advice.

    Now the books are being contributed (not all, to be sure, but very many), and I fear for their future, almost as if they were refugees (难民). “Habent sua fata libelli”, goes as the old Latin saying, originally written by Terentianus; it meant that the fate and future of books were determined by the capability of the reader. But the meaning of the phrase has been misunderstood by time and is now associated with the physical fate of particular books, how they have passed from owner to owner. This is how Walter Benjamin read the saying when he wrote his essay “Unpacking My Library”, which analyses the extraordinarily close relationship between a collector and his or her books.

    When I deal with the books that many are going to charity shops, I hope they will find good homes, I can't help wondering if my generation is the last that will oversee such a process. Books are disappearing, as more and more are bought in electronic form and exist only as bytes of information on e-books or other devices. Does this matter? Could books become more spiritual, as they lose their physicality?

    When I was a little girl, I remember that when my dad was repairing something, he would ask me to hold the hammer, so we would have time for a conversation with each other. I never saw my dad drinking or taking a night out. All he did after work was taking care of his family.

    I grew up and left home for college and since then, my dad had been calling me every Sunday morning. And when I bought a house several years later, my dad painted it by himself in the fierce summer heat. All he asked was to talk to him, but I was too busy in those days.

    Four years ago, my dad visited me. He spent many hours putting together a swing for my daughter. He asked me to have a talk with him, but I had to prepare for a trip that weekend.

    One Sunday morning we had a telephone talk as usual. I noticed that my dad had forgotten some things that we discussed lately. I was in a hurry, so our conversation was short. Several hours later that day I received a call. My father was in the hospital. Immediately I bought a plane ticket and on my way I was thinking about all the occasions I missed to have a talk with my dad. By the time I arrived at the hospital, my father had passed away. Now it was he who did not have time for a conversation with me. I realized how little I knew about my dad, his deepest thoughts and his dreams.

    After his death I learned much more about him and even more about myself. All he ever wanted was my time. And now he has all my attention every single day.

Visit Chicago Children's Museum

    In brief:

    This museum offers plenty of fun hands-on activities for kids. However, this is one of the few Chicago museums not "fun for the whole family" as adults and older kids will be bored to tears.

    Address: 700 East Grand Ave. (Navy Pier), Chicago

    Phone: 312- 527-1000

    Public transportation:

    CTA bus lines # 29 (State Street), #65 (Grand Avenue), and # 66 (Chicago Avenue) all serve Navy Pier.

    Parking fees:

    · Monday through Thursday: $ 20

    · Friday through Sunday: $ 24

    · Holidays: $ 24

    Opening hours:

    · Weekdays: 10 a. m.-5 p. m

    · Weekends: 10 a. m.-8 p. m

    Entrance fees:

    ·Adults: $12

    ·Children: $12

    ·Seniors (65+): $11

    ·Children (under 5): free

    Activities:

    Located at one of Chicago's top tourist attractions, Navy Pier, the museum offers three floors of activities for kids, including:

    ·Play It Safe—all about home safety

    ·Inventing Lab—provides parts and instructions for creating things

    ·Kids Town—a playroom recreating a Chicago neighborhood where kids can pretend to do things like shopping for groceries and driving a CTA bus

    ·Climbing Schooner—a three-floor climbing building

    ·My Museum—kids get to create various pieces of art that are "all about me"

    ·Skyline—kids learn about skyscrapers and design their own buildings

    ·Tree House Trails—a play area designed like a forest

    ·Waterways—water activities showing how pumps and dams work

    Chinese high school students have the longest study hours compared to their peers (同龄人) in Japan, the US and the Republic of Korea, a survey conducted by the four countries said.

    The survey, released by the China Youth and Children Research Center (CYCRC) on Monday, was jointly conducted with institutions in the four countries in September—October of 2008. It covers nearly 4, 000 students in senior high schools and vocational high schools in the four countries.

    About 78.3 percent of Chinese students said they spend more than eight hours at school and 56.7 percent said they study at least two more hours each day at home. By contrast, only 24.7 percent of their peers in the US, 20.5 percent in Japan and 15.4 percent in Korea study more than two hours after school.

    Around 60 percent of all students surveyed said their burden for studies was the heaviest; however, the Japanese felt their burden was the worst with respondents (应答者) reaching 79.2 percent.

    Among the five biggest headaches for young people in the four countries were: over—scheduling ranked first, followed by a boring leisure life, unsatisfied appearance, little time for exercise and making friends, and no spare money.

    "Moderate (适度的) study pressure can better drive students to develop, however, too much will squeeze (挤) their development space, and can even cause harm to their physical and psychological health," the survey said.

    "Balancing their studies and all-round development is a very important task," it said.

    It's common knowledge that the woman in Leonardo da Vinci's most famous painting seems to look back at observers, following them with her eyes no matter where they stand in the room. But this common knowledge turns out wrong.

    A new study finds that the woman in the painting is actually looking out at an angle that's 15.4 degrees off to the observer's right­well outside of the range that people normally believe when they think someone is looking right at them. In other words, said the study author, Horstmann, "She's not looking at you." This is somewhat ironic, because the entire phenomenon of a person's gaze (凝视) in a photograph or painting seeming to follow the viewer is called the "Mona Lisa effect" . That effect is absolutely real, Horstmann said. If a person is illustrated or photographed looking straight ahead, even people viewing the portrait from an angle will feel they are being looked at. As long as the angle of the person's gaze is no more than about 5 degrees off to either side, the Mona Lisa effect occurs.

    This is important for human interaction with on-screen characters. If you want someone off to the right side of a room to feel that a person on-screen is looking at him or her, you don't cut the gaze of the character to that side­surprisingly, doing so would make an observer feel like the character isn't looking at anyone in the room at all. Instead, you keep the gaze straight ahead.

    Horstmann and his co-author were studying this effect for its application in the creation of artificial-intelligence avatars(虚拟头像) when Horstmann took a long look at the "Mona Lisa" and realized she wasn't looking at him.

    To make sure it wasn't just him, the researchers asked 24 people to view images of the "Mona Lisa" on a computer screen. They set a ruler between the viewer and the screen and asked the participants to note which number on the ruler intersected Mona Lisa's gaze. To calculate the angle of Mona Lisa's gaze as she looked at the viewer, they moved the ruler farther from or closer to the screen during the study. Consistently, the researchers found, participants judged that the woman in the "Mona Lisa" portrait was not looking straight at them, but slightly off to their right.

    So why do people repeat the belief that her eyes seem to follow the viewer? Horstmann isn't sure. It's possible, he said, that people have the desire to be looked at, so they think the woman is looking straight at them. Or maybe the people who first coined the term "Mona Lisa effect" just thought it was a cool name.