Valentine's Day, a day traditionally reserved for expressing romantic love, is observed practically all around the world. However, not many people are familiar with Sweetest Day. Actually it is a holiday, especially designed to express love and care for those who were routinely neglected（忽视）by society.

Sweetest Day was the idea of Herbert Birch Kingston, who worked for a company in Cleveland, Ohio. He felt that there were plenty of children, especially orphans and poor kids, who didn't necessarily get the attention they deserved. Thus in 1922, he launched the first Sweetest Day to give out boxes of candy to mainly poor children.

    Since the day picked was the third Saturday in October, this became the traditional time to celebrate Sweetest Day. The tradition was so enjoyed that people often looked beyond kindness to treating their own friends or family to treats on Sweetest Day.

    In the US, Sweetest Day is celebrated primarily in the Northeastern region of the US, still on the third Saturday of October. Yet news of the tradition, which began nearly 100 years ago, has spread to other parts of the country, especially as people who lived in those areas moved elsewhere. People may distribute candy or small gifts to those in patient homes, hospitals, foster homes, or mental institutions, and they may also treat friends and family to little gifts from the heart.

    In keeping with the original tradition, celebrating Sweetest Day should really be most focused on people who ordinarily don't have the good fortune of attention from friends or family, either due to difficult family circumstances or to poverty. This can be a great tradition to start if your community doesn't routinely celebrate the day, and there are many candy manufacturers that are willing to help donate or reduce costs on gifts intended for people in unfortunate circumstances.

Model Railroading

    Would you like to know a fun way to learn about math? Well, you can do that with model railroading. Yes, it's true. You can learn about many school topics without using a school book. Besides that, there are many other benefits that model railroading brings us as well. In this article, we will discuss just a few of those benefits of model railroading.

Patience and problem solving skills

    When you build a model railroad, you have to plan your railroad out. You have to decide where the tracks (轨道) will go, where to put buildings, where to put streets and any other things you would like to add to your model railroad. Also, you have to think about any problems you may have with the design you choose. How will you make railroad crossings? How will you design hills, mountains, and rivers? Deciding on what to do with your model railroad takes a lot of thought and patience, but it is not as difficult as you may think.

Building skills

    With model railroading, you learn how to put together plastic models of buildings. Also, you can learn how to build a table for your design, or make scenery for the geography of your design. Your model railroad runs on electricity, so you learn about electronics as well. These are skills that not only help you build a model railroad; these skills will help you all throughout life.

Fun for family and friends

    Different from many video games, model railroading is a social hobby that lets you communicate with family and friends. This is because you have to communicate with family and friends as you build and run your model railroad. By spending time with the people in your life you love and care about, you learn to become closer and care more for each other. This is one of the best parts of model railroading as a hobby. Of course, the best part about model railroading is running the trains. Watching the trains run around the track and make all the sounds and do all the things that real trains do gives people hours of enjoyment. Also, there is great satisfaction in the fact that you, your family, and your friends built the model railroad.

    I hope you can learn to enjoy model railroading and experience all the benefits you just read about and many others. Happy railroading!

    It may surprise bookworms, but apparently masterpieces such as Jane Eyre are lacking in something — sound effects. An electronic-book firm is adding background noises and music to the works of Charlotte Bronte, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and William Shakespeare in the hope of attracting younger readers. In one example, a description of rain lashing against a window in a Sherlock Holmes story will be“enhanced”with matching noises.

    The first multimedia e-books — with sounds to accompany novels — will be available this Friday in the UK. The Booktrack releases are available to iPad users, with other tablet computer versions to follow. The concept is already in use in the U.S., where the classics come with added sound effects. Readers for example can hear the china cups chinking in Mr. Darcy's garden as they read Pride And Prejudice.

    A story by Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie will be released later in the year with a specially crafted orchestral score. Rushdie's story In The South will be released with a soundtrack provided by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

    The Power Of Six by Pittacus Lore, a novel for young adults, is one of the first to be tested with a soundtrack which builds in suspense in keeping with the plot. It works by timing the speed of each reader and the software measures the “turning” of a page and moves the music or sounds along accordingly. It has been created by Booktrack which synchronizes (使同步) music to each novel. It is funded by Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal.

    Mr. Thiel said, “It's always exciting to witness the creation of a new form of media. The technology promises to captivate readers in a different way.”

    However, they have been greeted with horror by traditionalists, who say the technology takes away the pleasure of having one's imagination stimulated by a story. They also raise the prospect (预期) of having to ask an overly eager reader to turn their book down. David Nicholls, whose bestseller One Day was recently turned into a film starring Anne Hathaway, said, “This sounds like the opposite of reading. It would be a distraction.”

    Everybody hates rats (big mice). But in the earthquake capitals of the world — Japan, Los Angeles, Turkey — rats will soon be man's best friends.

    What happens after an earthquake? We send in rescue dogs. Why? Because they can smell people. Dogs save lives. They help rescuers to find living people. But dogs are big and they can't get into small spaces. So now a new research project is using a smaller animal to save lives: the rat.

    How does it work? First, the rat is trained to smell people. When this happens, the rat's brain gives a signal (信号)．This is sent to a small radio on its back, and then the rescuers follow the radio signals. When the rat's brain activity jumps, the rescuers know that someone is alive. The rat has smelled that person.

    Although there are already robots which can do this job, rats are better. Christian Linster at Cornell University, New York, says, "Robots' noses don't work well when there are other smells around. Rats are good at that." Rats can also see in the dark. They are cheaper and quicker to train than dogs, and unlike robots, they don't need electricity!

    The "rat project" is not finished, but Julie Ryan of International Rescue Organization in Scotland says, "It would be wonderful. A rat could get into spaces we couldn't get to, and a rat would get out if it wasn't safe." Perhaps for the first time in history, people will be happy to see a rat in a building (but only after an earthquake, of course).

    Why Black Friday Shoppers Still Crowd Stores

    To many of us, the ideas of rushing out to a superstore the day after Thanksgiving is appealing. Why would anyone race to crowded stores when they could stay in with family, or watch college football? We can't say we know the answer for sure. But we do feel amazed at those who pour into stores looking for Black Friday bargains. Seemingly, nothing can stop them. Not the weather. Not the crowds. And not the fact that hurrying to a store in the age of instant e-commerce seems so…last century.

    To be sure, holiday shopping habits do appear to be shifting. The National Retail (零售) Federation has stopped breaking up its holiday sales numbers by whether they come from e-tail purchases or from physical stores. It's a pretty good sign that retailers don't want to bring further attention to the declining fortunes of brick-and-mortar stores.

    But there is no denying that people still love going to stores. Actual shopping in actual places remains an important part of the holiday ceremony for millions of Americans. To many, it's the difference between playing a sport and playing a video game. As commercial as stores may be, they are still places where actual human beings interact. In a store, the “courageous” shopper performs the approving act of finding a present. That item might be heavily promoted by the store, but it doesn't drop into one's cart. It is picked up and examined before a decision is made. Maybe it gets put back on the shelf when the shopper changes his or her mind. Maybe there is a conversation with a sales clerk. The process is not that different than it would have been decades ago.

    Online, the shopper has barely logged in before being faced with disturbing algorithmic (大数据的) suggestions based on earlier purchases. This hardly qualifies as shopping. This hardly qualifies as thinking.

    Perhaps we are reading too much into the Black Friday phenomenon. But we suspect one reason Black Friday remains is that it involves an act of resistance against the Internet age. That would hardly be unreasonable. There aren't many studies showing that time spent in stores is bad for one's health, while there are quite a few drawing a link between time spent online and depression. Perhaps the people crowding into stores aren't the crazy ones after all.

Rich as a King

    William 1, who conquered England some 930 years ago, had wealth, power and an army. Yet although William was very rich by the standard of his time, he had nothing like a flush toilet (抽水马桶), paper towels, or riding lawn mower (除草机). How did he get by?

    History books are filled with wealthy people who were poor compared to me. I have storm windows, Croesus did not. Entire nations trembled before Alexander the Great, but he couldn't buy cat food. Czar Nicholas lacked an electric saw.

    Given how much better off I am than so many famous dead people, you'd think I'd be content. The trouble is that, like most people, I compare my wealth with that of living person: neighbors, school classmates, famous TV people. The greed I feel toward my friend Howard's new kitchen is not reduced by the fact that no kings ever had a refrigerator with glass doors,

    There is really no rising or falling standard of living. Over the centuries people simply find different things to feel sad about. You'd think that simply not having disease would put us in a good mood, but no we want a hot bath too.

    Of course, one way to achieve happiness would be to realize that even by today's standards the things I own are pretty nice. My house is smaller than the houses of many investment bankers, but even so it has a lot more rooms than my wife and I can keep clean.

    Besides, to people looking back at our era from a century or two in the future, these bankers' fancy counter tops and my awn worn Formica will seem equally shabby, I can't keep up with my neighbors right now. But just wait.