The other day I was doing unittest using sublime text 3 with Hermes, providing interaction with Jupyter kernels. Everything was fine until the unitest error occured:
1 | if __name__ == '__main__': |
After changing to:
1 | if __name__ == '__main__': |
Solved.
In IBM Data Science Capstone Project, we have to import Neighbourhoods Postal Codes of Toronto in order to fetch information using Foursquare API. We can obtain geojson file of Toronto Open Data but the geojson file is actually divided by Neighbourhood division, not on its postal codes. We have to customize our geojson file, using shape file from Statistics Canada.
Pay attention to select right shapefile:
Let us first import python packages.
1 | # library to handle data in a vectorized manner |
Then let us try to clean data and have postal codes of Toronto FSAs.
1 | # Read wikipedia page |
We will need GIS software to open shapefile (.shp). Fortunately Mac user could download the QGIS software from here.QGIS is A Free and Open Source Geographic Information System. You can create, edit, visualise, analyse and publish geospatial information on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD and mobile devices.
Now we have our valid postal codes list for analysis, shapefile of Canada as well as GIS software to read shapefile. Let’s try read shapefile of canada.
After open QGIS, first we have to open shapefile and add vector layer.
Then we could take a close look of our file.
We only need Toronto’s FSAs geojson so we have to filter our layer. Again, we select Layer - Filter or we could just simply use shortcut for filter: command + f
Ok. So on query builder there are three fields on the file: “CFSAUID” “PRUID” “PRNAME”. On the Values box we can press ‘all’ to observe each field.
Now we could filter our layer using postal codes of Toronto. Let us provide specific filter expression
1 | "CFSAUID" IN (postal codes list)" |
Let’s test the filter to see if it is working.
96 rows. Looks good.
Now let us save this layer to GeoJSON format. Layer - Save as. Please set to format to WGS84 format since we will need folium package to create a map based on GeoJSON file.
Voila. Here is out geojson file of Toronto. Let us try to create population choropleth map of Toronto. Here I uploaded the GeoJSON to Github. Feel free to download it.
Statistics Canada has provided the information based on FSAs. Let us first do some data cleaning.
1 | # fetch url |
Ok. We have our population data as well as geojson file. Let’s map it.
1 | # map rendering library |
Here is the map. Thank you for reading this.
I tried to override color settings of hexo theme after editing source/css/_variables/base.styl
1 | // Colors |
However it just couldn’t work out and the color theme of github page remained unchanged. After closer look of source/css/main.styl:
1 | // CSS Style Guide: http://codeguide.co/#css |
It was simply because the scheme of Hexo theme set to “Muse” instead of the one I used “Mist”. Remeber there are 4 color shcemes under hexo-theme-next.
After changing scheme to “Mist”, everything was back on track.
The Chinese Canadian community in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) was first established around 1877. According to Statistics Canada - 2016 Census of Population, there are 631,050 Chinese in the Greater Toronto Area, second only to New York City for largest Chinese community in North America. Food and Restaurant is always a vital part in immigrant communities progress, not only maintaining links to homeland culture but also in allowing immigrants to share this culture with the host community.
It is well known that there are countless Chinese restaurants located throughout Toronto. However, Szechuan cuisine, which is extremely welcomed by people all over China, is still a newcomer in Toronto. In this capstone project I will try to identify several areas suitable for new Szechuan Restaurant in Greater Toronto Area, Ontario.
In the following section I will use knowledges and skills learned from IBM Data Science to locate promising neighbourhoods for Szechuan Restaurant.
Realtors, financial services companies, immigrants services agencies as well as immigrant investors surging into Canada would be very interested in finding new hotspots for investment.
Data sources will be used in this analysis are:
List of Postal code of Canada: This wikipedia page is for obtain all the neighbourhoods, including postal code, borough in Toronto.
Coordinates of neighbourhoods: This CSV file is downloaded from Coursera IBM Data Science course page.
Restaurants details, including category and location in Toronto neighbourhood will be obtained using Foursquare API.
Toronto GeoJSON file: City of Toronto Open Data provides Toronto Boundaries of City of Toronto neighbourhoods. I used this GeoJson file to create choropleth map for Toronto.
Immigration and ethnocultural diversity statistics: City of Toronto Open Data and Census of Population, 2016. These two resources are extremely helpful when conducting this analysis.
City Center of Toronto : Here I am using Toronto City Hall as city center. The geographical coordinates are obtained using GeoPy.
Business Improvement Areas: A Business Improvement Area (BIA) is an association of commercial property owners and tenants within a defined area who work in partnership with the City to create thriving, competitive, and safe business areas that attract shoppers, diners, tourists, and new businesses. The GeoJson file for BIA could be found here.
List of Data obtained and cleaned:
In this section I will try to find patterns for existing Chinese/Szechuan Restaurants in Toronto and spot potential venues for opening new Szechuan Restaurants. Toronto is the most populous city in Canada and the fourth most populous city in North America with 140 neighbourhoods. However, according to Toronto Neighbourhood Population Profiles, the estimated downtown population of Toronto in 2015 is between 242,845 to 245,830, compared to 2,956,024 of City Toronto. In that case, there must be some distinct business approaches to open a business in and out of downtown area. Besides, the Immigration and ethnocultural diversity in Toronto, which in our project we will focus on East and Southeast Asians population distributions in Toronto, will have impacts on locations and numbers of our target restaurants.In following sections we are expected to see some totally different strategies for local Chinese and Szechuan restaurants.
Now we have our data:
First I will try to visualize number and locations of Chinese Restaurants in and out of Toronto Downtown area in each neighbourhood.
Then let us try to find patterns for locations of Chinese Restaurants in and out of Toronto Downtown area. I will use heatmaps to conduct this analysis.
Last I will use Density Based Clustering to find patterns of Chinese/Szechuan Restaurants and identify certain cluster groups as candidate neighbourhoods for opening Szechuan Restaurants.
Most of the traditional clustering techniques, such as k-means, hierarchical and fuzzy clustering, can be used to group data without supervision. However, when applied to tasks with arbitrary shape clusters, or clusters within cluster, the traditional techniques might be unable to achieve good results. That is, elements in the same cluster might not share enough similarity or the performance may be poor. Additionally, Density-based Clustering locates regions of high density that are separated from one another by regions of low density. Density, in this context, is defined as the number of points within a specified radius. In this section, the main focus will be manipulating the data and properties of DBSCAN and observing the resulting clustering.
Here we can create a bar chart to better analyze the data.
We can see from the bar chart that the dominant number of Chinese Restaurants are in Kensington Market, Chinatown and Grange Park, all of them are in downtown area, which totally make sense since it is the commercial and business center of a city.
We can also create a bar chart to show number of Chinese Restaurants in different Boroughs.
However, when we turn to borough analysis, there is a different story. The high density of Chinese restaurants in downtown is totally making sense. Then why the number of Chinese Restaurants in North York area stands out?
In order to find reasons for high number of Chinese Restaurants in North York, let us try to create choropleth map of Toronto and see whether there is positive correlation between high population density of East and Southeast Asians and numbers of Chinese Restaurants.
According to Toronto Open Data, the North York neighbourhoods are consisted of ward 6, 8, 15, 16, 17, 18, with high density of East and Southeast Asians origins. From the map above we can conclude that there is positive correlation between high population density of East and Southeast Asians and numbers of Chinese Restaurants. That is our first conclusion.
It seems like most of the Szechuan Restaurants tend to stay in clusters with Chinese Restaurants in downtown areas. None of Szechuan Restaurants are spotted in other neighbourhoods besides downtown Toronto. Let us see if we can create a Heatmap to better visualize it.
This heatmap shows that most of Szechuan Restaurants are in Kensington Market, Chinatown. Let us create a BIA (Business Improvement Area) map to see whether it can back up our conclusion.
Disclaimer : A Business Improvement Area (BIA) is an association of commercial property owners and tenants within a defined area who work in partnership with the City to create thriving, competitive, and safe business areas that attract shoppers, diners, tourists, and new businesses. The BIA layer represents the active BIAs in the City of Toronto that has been enacted by Council. Each BIA has been defined by a by-law and is represented by a Board of Management. The layer is updated as BIAs are created, amended or deleted by Council.
Now we can make several conclusions based on the maps above:
Now let’s continue searching for optimal locations for Szechuan restaurants. In this section I will use Density Based Clustering to locate candidates clusters for opening Szechuan Restaurants.
Now we have our candidate clusters for opening new Szechuan Restaurants. In order to find the optimal clusters, here I set criterion for this analysis:
Let us take a look at clusters, from outlier cluster label 0 to label 12. Outlier with label -1 will not be included in the analysis.
Cluster 0: Potential.
1) In Chinese Restaurants Clusters;
2) No Szechuan Restaurant in Cluster;
3) In Downtown BIA area;
4) High population density of East and Southeast Asian origins.
Cluster 1: Potential.
1) In Chinese Restaurants Clusters;
2) Szechuan Restaurant in Cluster;
3) In Downtown BIA area;
4) High population density of East and Southeast Asian origins.
Cluster 2: Not Recommended.
1) Out of Chinese Restaurants Clusters (potential outlier);
2) No Szechuan Restaurant in Cluster;
3) In Downtown BIA area;
4) High population density of East and Southeast Asian origins.
Cluster 3: Not Recommended.
1) In Chinese Restaurants Clusters;
2) FOUR Szechuan Restaurant in Cluster;
3) In Downtown BIA area;
4) High population density of East and Southeast Asian origins.
Cluster 4: Fair.
1) In Chinese Restaurants Clusters;
2) No Szechuan Restaurant in Cluster;
3) Out of Downtown BIA area;
4) Moderate population density of East and Southeast Asian origins (Near Chinatown).
Cluster 5: Potential.
1) In Chinese Restaurants Clusters;
2) No Szechuan Restaurant in Cluster;
3) In Downtown BIA area;
4) Low population density of East and Southeast Asian origins (Near Chinatown).
Cluster 6: Potential.
1) In Chinese Restaurants Clusters;
2) No Szechuan Restaurant in Cluster;
3) In Downtown BIA area;
4) Low population density of East and Southeast Asian origins (Near Chinatown).
Cluster 7: Not Recommended.
1) In Chinese Restaurants Clusters;
2) SIX Szechuan Restaurant in Cluster;
3) In Downtown BIA area;
4) High population density of East and Southeast Asian origins (Chinatown).
Cluster 8: Fair.
1) In Chinese Restaurants Clusters;
2) No Szechuan Restaurant in Cluster;
3) Not in Downtown BIA area;
4) Moderate population density of East and Southeast Asian origins.
Cluster 9: Fair.
1) In Chinese Restaurants Clusters;
2) No Szechuan Restaurant in Cluster;
3) Not in Downtown BIA area;
4) Moderate population density of East and Southeast Asian origins.
Cluster 10: Fair.
1) In Chinese Restaurants Clusters;
2) No Szechuan Restaurant in Cluster;
3) Not in Downtown BIA area;
4) High population density of East and Southeast Asian origins.
Cluster 11: Fair.
1) In Chinese Restaurants Clusters;
2) No Szechuan Restaurant in Cluster;
3) Not in Downtown BIA area;
4) High population density of East and Southeast Asian origins.
Cluster 12: Fair.
1) In Chinese Restaurants Clusters;
2) No Szechuan Restaurant in Cluster;
3) In Downtown BIA area;
4) Low population density of East and Southeast Asian origins.
Finally we have spotted 4 clusters with high potential to open new business. We give it star label with colour blue.
This concludes our analysis. We have spot 4 cluster Areas with high potential to open Szechuan restaurants, with Chinese Restaurants nearby, no Szechuan Restaurant in cluster, high population density of East and Southeast Asian origins and all clusters in Downtown Toronto Business Improvement Area.
Please notice this analysis is only a starting line to find and define business patterns of Restaurant & Food service industry. Except for locations, there are still tons of factors that should be taken into considerations such as anticipated sales volume, accessibility to potential customers, rents, security issues et cetera.
[1] Vieregge, M., Lin, J. J., Drakopoulos, R., & Bruggmann, C. (2009). Immigrants Perception of Ethnic Restaurants: The Case of Asian Immigrants Perception of Chinese Restaurants in Switzerland. Tourism Culture & Communication, 9(1), 49–64. doi: 10.3727/109830409787556684
[2]finding optimal locations of new stores by ibm
[3]generating geojson file for toronto fsas by amy gordon
[4]housing sales prices & venues data analysis of istanbul by sercan yıldız
[5]visualizing geospatial data in python using folium by aly sivji
[6]folium documentation 0.11.0
HOW YOU KNOW YOU’VE MADE IT, BY CITY
美国各大城市精英人物剪影（并不）
By Irving Ruan and Alex Watt
欧文·阮，亚力克斯·华特
February 26, 2020
2020年2月26日
Los Angeles
洛杉矶，加利福尼亚
You live inside the Hollywood sign with six rescue Chihuahuas, who only drink Essentia ionized water and eat Beyond Meat. Everything in your home is minimalist but littered with award statues. You’re a walking, talking, Pilates-doing Instagram goal. But you quit the app for good, to focus on “humanness,” whatever that means.
艾玛和六只领养的吉娃娃一起住在好莱坞标志里，只喝ESSENTIA牌电离碱性ph平衡水，只吃Beyond Meat牌素食仿造肉。宅子里的家具和布置都严格遵循极简主义法则，然而室内却随意乱放着各类小金人奖杯。不管是走路，对话或者是普拉提——艾玛生活里的一切都是为了成为Instagram的焦点人物。某天她突然再也不用这个破瘠薄软件了，原因是想要真正了解自己的“人省（humanness）”。可惜这个生造词艾玛也不知道是啥意思。
Portland
波特兰，俄勒冈
You had a cameo in “Portlandia” and own a bicycle, a unicycle, and another bicycle. You maintain a well-oiled beard and know exactly which doughnut shop to go to (not that one). You make a vegan breakfast burrito that’s so delicious and full of highly enriched riboflavin that one can hardly taste the shame you feel for working in advertising.
波波在著名肥皂剧《波特兰迪亚》（Portlandia，共8季）里跑龙套，他有一辆自行车，
一辆独轮车还有另外一辆自行车。波波每天都仔细打理自己的油鬍子，如果想知道哪家店卖的甜甜圈好吃，问他准行（肯定不是这家）。波波拿手好戏是素食主义者的最爱——早餐卷饼，好吃到爆不说还富含核黄素。吃着卷饼唱着歌，然而没人能尝到波波在广告业打工的耻辱和艰辛。（最后一句翻译的可能有点问题。。）
Miami
迈阿密，弗罗里达
You’re tanned but, like, in the most impossibly even way, and you still somehow look young enough to be carded at Enterprise Rent-A-Car. You take trips to the Bahamas just for the ’gram and then fly back the same day to party at a night club where the bouncer’s name is Rocco. You drive a speedboat everywhere (when your private plane is on loan to DJ Khaled).
咪咪浑身上下、正面侧面都晒成了完美的棕褐色，然而在企业租车行（Enterprise Rent-A-Car）她还是因为看起来太小而不得不一次又一次出示自己的身份证件。这天她忙的一笔，一天之内就得乘机往返巴哈马，白天Instagram，晚上夜店趴体，门口保安洛科和她早就是老相识了。咪咪到哪儿都开着快艇，贼爽。（她的豪华私人飞机早已租给DJ Khaled使用）
Cleveland
克利夫兰，俄亥俄
You live in Cleveland. You haven’t made it.
老詹住在克利夫兰。在这儿他当不了精英人士。
San Francisco
旧金山，加利福尼亚
You just closed a five-hundred-and-ten-billion-dollar Series K round of venture-capital funding for your cryptocurrency startup, DoucheCoin. The influx of cash has allowed you to become the proud new owner of a two-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot studio apartment in Nob Hill, which only set you back three billion dollars. You drive a 2007 Toyota Prius. (It’s part of your self-made mythos.)
杰克张刚刚获得了5100亿美元的k轮融资，行业大佬们都对他发明的加密货币———傻币（DoucheCoin）情有独钟。每天公司现金流太多了，他不得不在贵族山（Nob Hill）买下了一套仅仅价值30亿美元的一居室，房屋面积：23平方米。与此同时，杰克张平常开的还是07年款的丰田普锐斯。（这也是他魅力人设的一部分。）
Nashville
纳什维尔，田纳西
Your alternative-folk-country-fusion band has performed at every music venue in town. People know you as the singer-songwriter to shoot whiskey with, before ending up at a hot-chicken joint. Your cowboy hat is as big and white as the moon, which is why you need to transport it in the flatbed of your pickup truck. You own a country ham signed by Kings of Leon.
迪蓝麾下的另类+民谣+乡村流派的融合乐团在村里每个剧院都留下过足迹。村民们十分了解他的德行，知道他不仅是个歌手还是个作曲家，对着瓶口吹完威士忌再来块儿辣中翅那是家常便饭。迪蓝有一张又大又白似月球的牛仔帽，得用皮卡的平板拖车才能放下。他还有一块摇滚天团“莱昂国王”（Kings of Leon）签过名的珍藏版乡村火腿。
Chicago
芝加哥，伊利诺伊
You’re a star member of three main-stage improv teams at Second City and the iO Theater, and you serve as the on-call entertainment for the best deep-dish establishment in town (not that one or the other one). Your main source of income is laughter and your biggest expense is sausages, but, if you ever need some extra cash, you know you can always become a placekicker for “da Bears.” You’re Chicago through and through, even though you technically grew up in Evanston.
老乔可是芝加哥第二城喜剧团（The Second City）以及iO剧院（Theater）即兴喜剧团队核心兼顶梁柱。他在团里负责一个非常重要的、需要随叫随到角色，表演内容也是芝加哥极富盛名的深喉（不是那个深喉哈，不要瞎想）。老乔每天用爱发电，吃的是草吐的是奶。观众的笑声是他最大的财富（也是他的工资），每天最大的消耗品是香肠。如果想赚点零花钱，老乔一般会去芝加哥熊队当射门员，每场比赛上场一分钟不到，多快好省。老乔总说“我和芝加哥（北京）血浓于水”或是“我可是老芝加哥（北京）了”，其实严格来说他是在埃文斯顿（张家口）长大的。
注：埃文斯顿（Evanston）是美国伊利诺伊库克郡的一個城市，南部紧邻芝加哥市。
Las Vegas
拉斯维加斯
You’re the most convincing Elvis in town and feel totally happy with your life, despite being on your fourth marriage. David Copperfield and Criss Angel are competing to be your best friend.
作为赌城里最富盛名的埃尔维斯，他对现在的日子十分满意，除了已经娶了第四个老婆之外生活一切安好。大卫·科波菲尔（美国著名魔术师）和克里斯·安吉尔（也是美国著名魔术师）为了能当他最好的朋友只能天天争风吃醋。
Austin
奥斯汀，得克萨斯
It’s unclear what “making it” in Austin looks like, since it’s still being gentrified by Silicon Valley burnouts and assholes.
硅谷的笨蛋傻叉们纷纷移居奥斯汀，把这儿弄得乌烟瘴气而又充满中产阶级低级趣味，当地居民直到现在也搞不清楚奥斯汀精英人物的标准是啥。
New York
纽约（国际机场）
After spending just enough time making short films backed by your friends and family from Cleveland, while living in a rent-controlled apartment directly above a slice shop where everyone knows your name but calls you “boss” anyway, you have no choice but to move to Los Angeles and become rich, famous, and Instagram goals, whatever that means.
斯蒂凡尼老家克利夫兰的朋友家人们为她筹拍的短视频含辛茹苦，出资出力，而斯蒂凡尼自己则住在一家小披萨店二层、针对低收入住户设置的出租公寓里。披萨店里每个小二都知道斯蒂凡尼的大名，然而在工作时间他们一般称她为“老板”。不管怎么说，在纽约这日子是过不下去了，斯蒂凡尼准备移居洛杉矶，在那儿，她才能变得有钱有名，又能成为Instagram的焦点人物。
What the Superhuman Controversy Reveals About the Shifting Ethics of Software
关于超新人类的争议揭露了软件行业道德标准的变更
The e-mail startup isn’t the only company learning that a product can be powerful and elegant without being good.
并不是唯一一个明白这个道理的电子邮件初创公司：一款不够善良的产品也能强大且优雅。
By Anna Wiener
Superhuman, a tech startup, allows users to see when and where e-mails they’ve sent have been opened. Should individuals have access to that kind of information?
一家名叫”超新人类”（superhuman）的创业公司给予了用户得知自己发送的邮件何时、何地被阅读的权利。个人应该拥有这个权限吗？
In recent months, those attuned to the affinities of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have been hearing about a young San Francisco startup called Superhuman. Though its name suggests a nootropics concern or a purveyor of networked exercise equipment, Superhuman’s unbodied offering is productivity software for the in-box. Its e-mail client—essentially, it’s an interface for Gmail and G Suite—is marketed as a high-powered “email experience”; users speed through their in-boxes via keyboard shortcuts, triaging their messages with assistive algorithms. Superhuman has cultivated the glimmer of exclusivity. To sign up for an account, which costs thirty dollars a month, individuals who haven’t been “referred” must cool their heels on a waiting list. A “pre-boarding” survey asks them to share their employers and job titles. In June, the company’s C.E.O., Rahul Vohra, described its user base to the Times as “the who’s who of Silicon Valley.”
最近几个月，那些与硅谷企业家及风投人士联系密切的人们一定听说过一家位于旧金山的年轻创业公司，超新人类。虽然它的名字听起来有点像聪明药或运动器材网络销售商，但超新人类提供的是邮件客户端软件。这款软件——基本上用于Gmail和G Suite——以其强力的“电子邮件体验”著称；用户们可以通过键盘快捷键快速浏览收件箱，并使用辅助算法对其消息进行分类。超新人类颇有独占鳌头的意味。要注册一个账户，用户们每月得花费高达30美元。那些没有得到产品邀请码的用户还只能在候补名单上干着急。超新人类还设计了一款针对享有”优先使用权“用户群体的调查，要求用户告知其雇主和职位。今年6月，该公司的CEO拉胡尔·沃赫拉（Rahul Vohra）将其用户群体称为“硅谷的闪亮名人们”。
On June 30th, someone crashed the party. A Seattle-based designer and tech executive named Mike Davidson published, on his personal Web site, a blog post titled “Superhuman is Spying on You.” It focussed on Superhuman’s read-receipts feature—a function, at that time enabled by default, that allows Superhuman’s users to see when and where e-mails they’ve sent have been opened by recipients. (It might report, for example, that an e-mail had been read at seven p.m. in Connecticut, then at nine p.m. in New York.) Using vivid examples, Davidson explained why this feature could be dangerous. He proposed a hypothetical scenario in which a woman being stalked and e-mailed by an ex could inadvertently telegraph her location while traveling. A pedophile, he argued, could use Superhuman to track the whereabouts of a child. Recipients of e-mails sent with the feature enabled had no way of knowing that their e-mails were being tracked and couldn’t opt out. “Ask yourself if you expect this information to be collected on you and relayed back to your parent, your child, your spouse, your co-worker, a salesperson, an ex, a random stranger, or a stalker every time you read an email,” Davidson wrote. “[Superhuman has] identified a feature that provides value to some of their customers . . . and they’ve trampled the privacy of every single person they send email to in order to achieve that.”
然而到了6月30号，有人过来砸场了。麦克·戴维森（Mike Davidson），一名在西雅图工作的设计师兼技术主管在他的个人网站上发表了一篇名为“超新人类在监视你”的文章。这主要基于超新人类软件获取已读回执的默认功能,用户即可得知他们发送的电子邮件于何时何地被收件人阅读。（比如说，软件会提示用户，这封邮件于晚上7点在康涅狄格州被阅读，之后晚上9点又再纽约被打开。）戴维森用了各式各样鲜活的例子来解释这项功能为何如此危险。一名女性可能正在被她的前任跟踪、发骚扰邮件，并在无意中通过邮件泄露自己的位置；恋童癖甚至可以使用该软件得知孩子们的行踪。打开这项功能的收件人对他们邮件被追踪的行为毫不知情，且没法关闭追踪功能。“大家扪心自问，你能接受每次打开电子邮件时的回执信息被收集起来，并发回给父母、孩子、配偶、同事、销售员、前任、一名陌生人或者跟踪狂吗？”戴维森写道，“（超新人类）发现了一项能给它部分客户提供价值的功能…而这个功能却是基于践踏每一个收件人隐私的基础上的。”
Davidson’s post immediately went viral, provoking alarm and concern. But it also inspired scorn and derision. On Twitter, industry leaders and entrepreneurs, some of whom were investors in Superhuman, rushed to the company’s defense. Many pointed out that the technology that enables read statuses—a technique known as pixel-tracking—is already widely employed by marketers, salespeople, and others who send mass e-mails and want to measure their appeal. (The New Yorker, like many media companies, uses pixel-tracking in its newsletters.)Others construed the blog post as a hit piece. “I can understand both sides,” Delian Asparouhov, a partner at the venture firm Founders Fund, tweeted. “But there’s a strong correlation between the people outraged by privacy and the people that I think are dumbasses in the Valley.” (Soon after, Asparouhov released Supertracker, an open-source application that allows anyone to embed tracking pixels in their e-mails or Web sites—an N.R.A. approach to the issue of user privacy.) “This Superhuman ‘scandal’ is fascinating,” Sam Lessin, a venture capitalist, posted. “In 2019 people really don’t understand how the internet works and what to be angry about.” The theory behind such arguments seemed to be that ignorance of a once obscure but now revealed technology rendered objections to it moot. If users didn’t know how a program worked, and later felt deceived, it was their fault for not keeping up.
提出质疑和警告的戴维森引发了热烈讨论，但他的博文也受到了抨击和嘲笑。一些投资了超新人类公司的IT行业领军人物和企业家们马上跳出来在推特上为公司进行辩护。他们指出，已读回执功能运用的这项名为“像素追踪”的技术早已被营销人员广泛使用，许多群发邮件的用户也想通过这个功能来衡量邮件的影响力（纽约客和其他传媒公司一样，也在通讯简报中使用了像素追踪）。还有一群人视其为诋毁新闻。迪利安·阿斯帕罗夫（Delian Asparouhov），一名风投基金的合伙人在推特上写道，“我理解两方的想法，只是从我的角度来看，那些因为隐私问题而暴怒的人和一些硅谷的傻冒呈很强的相关性。“（不久，阿斯帕罗夫发布了一款名为超级追踪（Supertracker）的应用，允许任何人将像素追踪技术嵌入到邮件及网站中————一项美国步枪协会般的用户隐私处理方式）“关于超新人类的这个‘丑闻’值得深挖”，风险投资人萨姆·莱辛（Sam Lessin）说，“都9102年了，人们还是不知道互联网是如何运行的，也不明白生气的点在哪儿。”言外之意，人们曾经忽略了这项技术背后晦涩难懂的原理，如今等到技术的面纱被揭开之后又开始抨击它，这一切的结果都只能是徒劳。如果人们之前不明白某项程序是如何运作的，随后又觉得自己受到了欺骗，那么原因很简单————你没能掌握最新的知识。
Pixel-tracking wasn’t invented by Superhuman. It has existed for years; the potential for it is built into the way images work online. On the Web, all digital images are stored on servers. When a Web browser loads an image, it requests it from its original host server. In the process, the browser shares information about its whereabouts. The information it transmits is limited but informative. It can include any metadata tied to an I.P. address: city, region, country, browser, and device type—even the I.P. address itself.
像素追踪技术并不是由超新人类发明的，它已经存在好些年了；这个技术的潜力在于图像的在互联网上的应用。网络上所有的电子图像都是被储存在服务器上的。当网络浏览器加载图像时，会向图像的原始服务器发出请求。在这个过程中，浏览器便透露了图像的行踪。这些被传递的信息看起来没什么，但实则提供了大量个人信息，内含一系列有关IP地址的元数据，包括你所处的城市、区域、国家、浏览器以及设备型号————甚至是你的IP地址本身。
As text-only e-mail gave way to image-rich e-mail, marketers quickly discovered how useful this property of online images could be. The use of image-based “Web beacons” proliferated. Images used for tracking are deliberately hard to detect—often just a single, transparent pixel in size. They are deployed on Web sites and in advertisements and e-mail; Amazon, Facebook, Google, and many other companies use tracking pixels to follow their users from site to site. While some e-mail clients, including Gmail, allow users to disable automatic image-loading, most load them automatically, making it difficult for recipients to opt out.
从纯文本电子邮件让步给富图像电子邮件后，市场营销人员马上发现了网络图片可以作为优秀的营销工具。随后，基于图形的网络信标技术（Web beacons）也推广开来。这些用于追踪的图像常常以一个像素尺寸大小的、透明的形式存在，因而非常难被检测。它们被部署在网站里、广告邮件里以及电子邮件里；亚马逊、脸书、谷歌等一系列公司都在使用该技术追踪并统计网站访客。Gmail等电子邮件供应商虽然提供允许用户关闭自动加载的功能，但大多数情况下图像都是自动加载的，于是收件人大多难以逃离被图像追踪的命运。
A few days after Davidson’s post, Vohra responded, also on Medium. “When we built Superhuman, we focused only on the needs of our customers. We did not consider potential bad actors,” he wrote. (An astonishing admission, in 2019.) He promised that his company would remove location data from read statuses, delete stored historical data, and make the feature an opt-in, rather than a default, for Superhuman users. Davidson, in his blog post, had argued that the inclusion of the read-receipts feature would have knock-on effects. “When products are introduced into the market with behaviors like this, customers are trained to think they are not just legal but also ethical,” he wrote. Vohra seemed to concede this point. “All else being equal, the market will generally buy the most powerful tools it can,” he went on. “We need to consider not only our customers, but also future users, the people they communicate with, and the Internet at large.” All the same, recipients of e-mails sent with the feature enabled still won’t be able to opt out, and won’t be alerted to the inclusion of a tracking pixel; Vohra suggested that they might protect themselves by exploring the “rich ecosystem of third-party privacy tools.”
戴维森发表文章的几天后，沃赫拉在Medium上进行了回应。他写道，”我们开发超新人类的时候心心念念的是消费者们的权益。我们是真没想过这些潜在的危险呢亲亲。“（在2019年还在发表这样的言论，可以说是非常令人震惊了。）他承诺将移除已读回执中的位置信息，删除目前服务器上的历史数据，并为软件用户将已读回执功能设置为默认关闭。戴维森在他的博客中写道，对已读回执功能的纵容将带来连锁效应，“当一款具有这类功能的软件上市后，消费者们将倾向于认为这些产品不仅合法，而且也满足道德规范”。沃赫拉看起来也承认这点。“如果一切顺利，一般来说，市场仍然将青睐于最强大的工具”，他写道。“我们不仅需要考虑我们现有的消费者、潜在客户、客户的客户，最终还要以互联网行业大局为重。”然而，无辜的收件人仍然无法选择关闭该功能，也对邮件中部署了像素追踪功能毫不知情；沃赫拉建议收件人们可以选择“丰富的第三方隐私保护工具”来保护自己。（我呸）
All of this seems familiar; these days, the ritualized trading of revelation and apology is commonplace in the software industry. And yet the controversy, and Superhuman’s limited, imperfect response to it, was a revealing snapshot of this moment in tech. For years, Silicon Valley benefitted from tech reporting that was either breathless and laudatory or simply indifferent. Since the 2016 election, though, tech coverage has grown more skeptical, investigative, and serious—a shift from treating Silicon Valley as a novelty to seeing it as the power center it has become. The industry has been struggling to adjust to being the center of attention on outsiders’ terms. Lately, in conversations with entrepreneurs and some tech workers, I’ve heard complaints about what they perceive as an anti-tech bias in the media. Tech, this thinking goes, is unfairly targeted. (Why pay so much attention to Facebook but not, say, Big Agriculture?) Social media is rife with grumbles of resentment from founders and venture capitalists, who seem to interpret pointed critique or scrutiny as jealousy and hostility. Criticism is seen as punishment for success, rather than attentiveness to power and influence. Variations on the sentiment that “it’s easier to criticize than create” proliferate. Feedback is internalized personally rather than structurally. There is a deepening sense of victimhood.
所有的这些说辞实在太眼熟了。曾经有一段时间，硅谷中充斥着边揭露黑幕和边道歉的仪式化交易。颇具争议的是，超新人类公司言辞闪躲、磕磕绊绊，恰恰是科技行业风靡一时的这段形式主义时期的映照。多年来，硅谷受益于各类热情洋溢、冷酷无情或无动于衷的新闻报道。然而自2016年大选以来，科技报道变得愈发多疑、深入和严肃————硅谷慢慢从新奇事物转变为权力的中心。IT行业一直在努力适应成为外界关注的焦点。近来我与一些企业家和一些技术员工谈了谈，他们都在抱怨媒体报道对科技存在的偏见。他们认为，IT行业被不公平地针对了。（媒体为什么如此关注Facebook而不是大农业呢？）社交媒体充斥着创始人和风投人士的愤懑，他们似乎将一些尖锐的批评或审查视为媒体的嫉妒和敌意。批评的文章也成了对他们事业成功的惩罚，而不是对行业权力及影响力的关注。硅谷行业人士人们对于“批评比创造更容易”的看法也是各式各样。然而这些反馈一直都没能从整体改变IT界人士的想法，这些群体沦为“被害人”的论调愈发强烈。
This defensive response to criticism—even when that criticism comes from someone like Davidson, who is not a member of the media but an industry insider—runs counter to Silicon Valley’s much-touted culture of iteration and rapid adaptation. There is a strange fatalism to the argument that pixel-tracking’s ubiquity is a testament to its permanence, and to the framing of these technologies, and their misuse, as inevitable. In a professional context, pixel-tracking is a fairly benign tool; it can be used for content marketing, lead generation, or reëngagement. But it takes on a different sheen when it’s deployed for personal use. There was nothing inevitable about the extension of this technology into the personal sphere—that was a product decision that Superhuman chose to make. Although there is some evidence that the use of tracking pixels has grown more common in one-to-one correspondence, it is essentially a niche practice; it’s still not obvious why productive people should want to track their correspondents the way marketers do.
对于超新人类软件的批评进行辩护（即使批评是来自戴维森这种来IT产业内部、而非媒体行业的人）的理念与硅谷盛行的迭代与快速适应文化（先行投放不完美的产品，随后再进行调整）相违背。大家对于像素追踪技术都普遍持有悲观的宿命论论调：像素追踪技术被人们广泛使用恰恰证明了它将永久流传。这项技术被栽赃、利用、甚至滥用都是不可避免的。当我们从专业的角度来看，像素追踪技术其实真的算是一个挺好的工具。它可以用做内容营销、潜在客户开发或者再互动广告。但是该技术一旦应用于单一个人，则将展示完全不同的面貌。这种技术扩展到个人领域是不可避免的———这也是超新人类作出的选择。尽管近些日子以来，像素追踪技术已经被越来越多的一对一通讯技术所使用，但这也只是一个基础的产品细分；迄今为止我们还是不明白，为什么这些高效能人士一定要像市场营销人员一样追踪他们的收件人呢？
Superhuman, of course, is not a mass-market consumer product (though Vohra has spoken about “making everybody superhuman” with software that can “democratize productivity”). Like most software products, it is designed to prioritize the specific interests of its own users: in this case, knowledge workers, managers, executives, and entrepreneurs. It’s for them that a Superhuman keyboard command called “Instant Intro”—a shortcut that replies-all, moves the original sender to BCC, and drops in a customizable text snippet (“Thanks, Pat! Moving you to BCC”)—is an appealing time-saver. E-mail, for this audience, is a chore, or a field of opportunity, at least as much as it’s a medium for interpersonal communication. And yet—if you’re not a stalker or creep—individual open-rate data is rarely actionable. One might experience anxiety upon seeing that someone has read but not responded to a message; glimpsing a correspondent’s e-mail habits, one might enjoy an ambient sense of superiority or leverage. The real value of read statuses may just be a feeling: being privy to other people’s data, consensually or otherwise, can create a sense of power or control. There’s a certain satisfaction to surveillance. Data isn’t necessarily knowledge, but it can feel like it.
超新人类当然不是一款大众营销消费品（虽然其CEO曾宣称“生产力民主化”的软件“能让每个人都变成超新人类”）。和大多数软件产品一样，超新人类划分了客户群体的需求优先级：它的客户群体主要是脑力工作者、经理、行政高层以及企业家等。超新人类为他们设计了一个键盘快捷键，“一键秒回”——能迅速回复全部收件人及发件人、将发件人密送给其他员工并附上一小段可自定义的文本（“谢谢你Pat!密送你啦“），这的确是个省时间的功能。对这群人来说，电子邮件而言是每天的日常联络手段，是一个满是机遇场所，或者至少也是私人通讯的有效手段。如果你不是跟踪狂之类的怪人，拿到这类开放数据其实基本上没什么用。我们或许会因为看到邮件阅读回执却没收到回复的邮件而感到焦虑；目光快速掠过收件人已阅读电子邮件的报告，我们也许会享受一丝掌控他人的优越感。但阅读回执给我们带来的真正价值有可能只是一种感觉，一种暗中观察窥视他人生活带来的权力感。监视确实能给人带来满足感。数据并不一定是知识，但是看起来却像知识一般，人人都想拥有。
At issue, ultimately, is the ethical question of what makes software “good.” The qualities of good software include seamlessness, efficiency, speed, simplicity, and straightforward user-experience design. Failing to maximize these values may feel, for a software engineer, like driving a Ferrari below the speed limit—a violation of the spirit of the enterprise. But the seamlessness, efficiency, and power experienced by users don’t necessarily translate to positive social experiences; the short-term satisfactions offered by software can upstage its longer-term implications.
其实我们讨论的终极问题在于，评价一个软件好坏与否，还需要考虑其伦理标准。优秀的软件包括无缝性、高效率、速度快、简单可用以及直观的用户体验设计。从一个软件工程师的角度来看，这些特点如果不能在软件中最大化地运用起来，感觉就像在开一辆限速的法拉利一般————违背了行业的灵魂。但是无缝性、高效率以及强大的用户体验并不能完全带来正向的社会效应；一款软件带来的短期效用很可能阻碍其长远发展。
One of the challenges of ethical software design is that, in some respects, it asks developers and designers to work against themselves and to counteract what makes software so useful in the first place. It’s not clear, to outsiders, how Superhuman decided to build read statuses; the final state of a shipped product is often the aggregation of a series of arbitrary choices made along the way, an accretion of guesswork, experimentation, and technical possibility. No matter how it was made, though, the lack of consensus about whether the decision was banal or egregious reveals a knot in Silicon Valley’s internal logic. The defense of technologies like pixel-tracking has long been that they are designed to operate at scale, where they are said to be harmless. But technologies that are useful and morally permissible in that context may be harmful and unethical at the ordinary, human level. The question then is how and when to scale them back.
关于软件设计的一个难题是，为了满足伦理标准，开发者及设计师会被要求作出一些对他们自己工作不利的调整，从而降低了软件的可用性。对于外行来说，超新人类软件设计已读功能的初衷不得而知；而最终发布的软件常常是一系列武断抉择、大量推测、实验以及技术不确定性的堆积品。无论软件是怎样被设计的，期间关于种种环节的决定是好是坏都缺少普遍共识，展现了IT行业内部逻辑文化的混乱。人们对于像素追踪这类技术的辩护常常从看似人畜无害的规模效应入手。然而这项看起来颇具规模效应、且在道德上被允许的技术应用在人类单一个体上却是违背道德且有害的。那么现在我们面临的问题变成了，如何减少危害性？什么时候才能消除这些负面影响呢？
How “Neon Genesis Evangelion” Reimagined Our Relationship to Machines
《新世纪福音战士》是如何让人类反思与机器的关系的
In “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” a Japanese series from 1995 that is now streaming on Netflix, real-robot weaponry meets super-robot mysticism.
1995年的日本作品《新世纪福音战士》上架Netflix，讲述真实系机器人的武器制造工艺与超级系机器人神秘主义的碰撞。
By Maya Phillips
June 21, 2019
On Friday, Netflix will begin streaming the 1995 Japanese series “Neon Genesis Evangelion.” The event marks one of the biggest anime acquisitions in history. For years, “Evangelion,” which is known for its combination of science fiction, dense psychological themes, and religious imagery, was a kind of Holy Grail for anime fans, much admired but near-impossible to find. (Legally, that is.) Still, the reach and influence of the series can still be felt today, in the way that “Evangelion” revolutionized a genre and its depiction of the relationship between human and machine.
本周五，于1995年在日本首次放送的动画作品《新世纪福音战士》（Neon Genesis Evangelion，以下简称为“EVA”）将于Netflix上架，这标志着历史上最大规模的动画版权购买。多年来，《EVA》运用了大量科幻、宗教及哲学意象，许多动漫欣赏者常视其为圣杯————受人尊崇却难觅其踪（的确如此）。直至今日，《EVA》以它革命性的流派、高水准的内容以及对人与机器关系的哲学刻画仍然对我们产生深远影响。
The genre in question is “mecha,” which is also the name of its principal element: big robots. After the age of kaijū eiga, or big-monster movies, like “Godzilla,” in the nineteen-fifties, a cluster of robots hit the scene in the sixties and seventies, including “Mazinger Z” and “Mobile Suit Gundam,” one of Japan’s largest franchises and a seminal example of the genre. (The Gundam franchise, which celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year, now comprises more than thirty series and movies—and a life-size Gundam statue in Tokyo.) The eighties introduced mechas like “Voltron” and “The Transformers,” the former of which has been resurrected, by Netflix, as a popular animated series, and the latter of which has been beaten into cinematic submission by Michael Bay. Since “Evangelion” premièred, in the nineties, there have been several other popular mecha: “Gurren Lagann,” “The Vision of Escaflowne,” “The Iron Giant,” “Full Metal Panic!,” “Eureka 7,” “Pacific Rim,” and more.
这充满疑问的流派名为“机甲”（mecha），也是构成作品的主要因素：大机器人。20世纪中期，《哥斯拉》这类怪兽电影或大怪物电影（kaijū eiga or big-monster movies）的时期过去后，《魔神Z》（Mazinger Z）和《机动战士高达》（Mobile Suit Gundam）一类的机器人电影于20世纪六、七十年代开始兴起。《高达》还是日本经久不衰、销量最高的商品之一，是机甲类影片的重要代表（高达迎来开播的第40周年纪念，共推出了超过三十部剧集及电影，以及一个放置在东京的1:1大小的高达模型）。到了20世纪八十年代，机甲电影以《战神金刚》（Voltron）及《变形金刚》（The Transformers）为代表。Netflix近期重制了《战神金刚》，推出了《新战神金刚：传奇的保护神》；《变形金刚》则由迈克尔·贝（Michael Bay）压缩成了系列电影。
《EVA》在20世纪90年代首映的同时，市面上还流行着其他的机甲作品，如《天元突破红莲螺岩》（Gurren Lagann）,《天空之艾斯嘉科尼》（The Vision of Escaflowne），《钢铁巨人》（The Iron Giant），《全金属狂潮》（Full Metal Panic!），《交响诗篇》（Eureka 7），《环太平洋》（Pacific Rim）等等。
Though the genre has its tropes—war, kid-pilots, secret organizations, and, of course, rock-’em-sock-’em robots—it isn’t monolithic. In “Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots,” Timothy N. Hornyak describes two subsets of mecha: the “super robot” show and the “real robot” show. The former, Hornyak writes, is more fantastical, with “machines of blockbusting might” that sometimes have mystical abilities. The latter, which was popularized by “Gundam,” features “giant robots that are realistic pieces of hardware . . . rather than superheroes.” The strangeness of “Evangelion”—what made it great—was that it drew from both camps while blurring the line between them.
尽管这个流派拥有它的固有形象和理念————战争、少年驾驶员、神秘组织，当然还少不了游戏《机器人格斗》（Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots）般的机器人——但是它们并未统一为一个大而有力的整体。在《爱上机械：日本机器人的艺术与科学》一书中，蒂莫西霍恩雅克（Timothy N. Hornyak）介绍了两类机甲：”超级系机器人“和”真实系机器人“。霍恩雅克写道，超级系机器人更像人想象中的模样。他们除了拥有“令人瞩目的力量”之外还兼有奥秘法术般的能力。真实系机器人中最广为流传的是“高达（Gundam）”，他们的躯体“是由真真正正的金属硬件制成。。。而不像那些凭血肉之躯就能上天入地的超级英雄。”《EVA》不可思议、也恰恰是令作品升华的特点是，剧中的机体结合了超级系机器人和真实系机器人的特点，并模糊了两类机器人的界限。
“Evangelion” is set in a post-apocalyptic earth, which is being attacked by powerful creatures called Angels. To defeat the Angels, scientists have created giant cyborgs called Evangelions, or EVAs, which can only be piloted by select children, one of whom is the protagonist, a lonely teen-age boy named Shinji. In the EVAs, real-robot weaponry meets super-robot mysticism. That’s the rub of “Evangelion”—the EVAs are not simply machines, but living beings. They’re manufactured clones of the Angels, who share ninety-nine per cent of their genetic material with humans, distinguishing them from super robots like the Transformers, which are sentient but alien by design. In many mecha shows, the metaphor of the human-machine relationship is clear: humans create weapons in their own image, as vehicles for a violence inherent to our species. There’s a fearsome uncanny valley at work, wherein the machines resemble humans but surpass them in their capacity for destruction. Such shows suggest that the farther humans walk on the path of advancement, the more dangerous their primitive urges become.
《EVA》发生在世界末日之后的地球，地球经受了超强生物————人们称它们为“使徒”（Angels）的攻击（南极爆发大灾害“第二次冲击”，约半数人类死亡——译者注）。科学家们制造了一批叫福音战士（Evangelions）的机体（cyborgs）以求击败使徒。只有一批天选少年才能驾驶机体，其中孤独的少年真嗣（Shinji）是本剧的主人公之一。《EVA》将真实系机器人的武器制造工艺与超级系机器人神秘主义相结合，捏出了机体的形状————它们不仅仅是单纯的机器，还是活生生、有灵魂的生物。机体由使徒克隆而成，与人类基因物质相似度达99%，从而能让人将他们与像变形金刚一样的超级系机器人区分开来。虽然变形金刚也是有感情的，但外表的设计与机体毫不相同。在许多机甲剧集里，关于人与机器关系的比喻非常明显：人类按照自己的外形来制造武器，好比暴力驾驶车辆是隐藏在我们每个人基因里的东西。机器与人类相仿，但破坏性却远超人类的恐怖谷理论让我们不寒而栗。种种迹象表明，人类在先进科技的道路上前行越远，他们的原始冲动就愈加可怕。
“Evangelion,” however, takes the theme of dehumanization even deeper, explicitly rolling it into a larger existential psychology. In one episode, Shinji’s EVA runs out of battery mid-battle; it has its arm ripped off and shuts down. At Shinji’s pleading, the EVA powers back on and physically transforms; its arm regenerates, but the limb now looks human, like Shinji’s, and the EVA roars, runs on all fours like a beast, and rabidly tears its enemy apart. Initially, Shinji’s agency here is unclear: Has he incited this change? He’s unseen for the rest of the episode, but it seems that, in awakening his EVA, he unlocked a monstrous, destructive id synonymous with—or derived from—his own. In the following episode, we discover that Shinji was changed, too: he’s physically absorbed into the EVA and, after a month-long gestation, experiences a kind of rebirth. The EVAs are oddly maternal figures: their adolescent pilots sit in a chamber of a kind of amniotic fluid, and their nervous systems are linked to the EVAs so that their bodies, like fetuses, are fuelled or depleted as the EVAs are. This attachment runs deep: throughout the series, the pilots struggle to define themselves inside and outside their EVAs. The teen pilots experience mental breakdowns and wonder who they are and what they value. Dehumanization, then, is not so simple a concept in “Evangelion.” The show introduces a brilliant chicken-and-egg conundrum: Do humans define machines, or do machines define us?
然而，《EVA》骨子里的去人性化要素更加深远，最后露骨地演变为存在主义心理学。在其中一集，真嗣的机体在战斗中耗尽了电量；上肢被撕裂，处于关机状态。在真嗣的祈求中，机体又复活了，物理形态随之改变；上肢再生后的形状与真嗣的肢体如此相似。机体和真嗣一样嘶吼、暴走，四肢着地扑向敌人，像野兽一样将敌人撕碎。一开始，真嗣的主观能动性发挥了多大作用，我们不得而知：是他引起了这场转变吗？剧集后半段真嗣并未出场，但是显而易见的是，为了唤醒机体，他释放出了内心深处滔天的毁灭性本我。在接下来的剧情中，真嗣也变了：机体和他在肉体上相融，经历了一个月时间的孕育，真嗣的经历类似于重生。机体是一些看起来与母亲形象相似的奇怪人形物体：青春期的驾驶员们坐在布满类似于羊水的膛室里，神经系统与机体相连。他们的身体像胚胎一般，无论精神抖擞或是精疲力尽，都与机体状态同步。驾驶员和机体的联系随着剧情更加深入：驾驶员们在努力地寻找他们在机体内外的人生定位。这些姑娘小伙们一次次经历着精神失常，思考自己的人生价值和定位。历此种种，去人性化在《EVA》里便有了更深层次的含义。剧集引用了这个绝妙的因果悖论：究竟是人类定义了机器，还是机器决定了什么是人类？
The final episodes of “Evangelion” notoriously depart from the action to take a dive into Shinji’s mind. Instead of a big blowout, we get rounds of existential queries from a boy who’s scared and alone. Shinji’s fear of his EVA’s destructive power and autonomy is rooted in his fear of himself, his capabilities, and his human urges, especially as he loses the purity of his youth. Here, “Evangelion” uses its genre’s tropes to illuminate one of the most daunting parts of the human experience: growing up. In many mechas, even if young pilots are tainted, in a sense, by the violence of war, their innocence may still absolve them. The youths in “Evangelion,” however, aren’t so protected, because their increasing proximity to adulthood estranges them from their chastity. In fact, the show has a series of Freudian themes tied to the pilots’ budding sexuality. (In one episode, Shinji imagines the women he knows naked, seducing him; in others, two female pilots are pen《EVA》trated by Angels in the form of phallic beams of light.) Like another, more recent mecha, “Darling in the Franxx,” a clear descendent of “Evangelion,” in which adolescent boy-girl pairs (suggestively called “stamens” and “pistils”) pilot the mechas in an indiscreet meeting of human sexuality and technology, “Evangelion” conflates the process of human maturation with militaristic advancement. The boy may wield a gun, but the man is the one who shoots.
《EVA》的最后一集臭名昭著地舍弃了剧集中延续的EVA大战使徒的动作部分，带领观众钻进了真嗣的思想世界。我们看到的不是他精神突然崩溃的场面，而是真嗣惊恐孤单的无数轮存在主义般的灵魂诘问。他对机体的破坏力和自主权充满畏惧，主要是来源于他对自己无能、人类冲动特别是丧失纯洁童年（？？？？？）的恐惧。《EVA》阐明了人类最恐怖的一段历程：成长。在很多机甲作品中，即使年轻的战士们被暴力战争的乌云所笼罩，他们的天真仍然庇护着他们。然而《EVA》里的少年们并未受到如此保护。他们与成人世界联系的如此紧密，纯真无暇的心境已渐行渐远。事实上，剧中还展现了年轻驾驶员们一系列弗洛伊德式的性感知。（在其中一集中，真嗣幻想着他认识的女人们全身裸露地勾引他；剧中还出现了两名女驾驶员被使徒阳具状的光柱穿过）。另一部近期机甲主题、明显由《EVA》衍生的动画————《情迷弗兰克斯》（Darling in the Franxx）描写的是一群青春期的少男少女结伴（称他们为雄蕊和雌蕊更为合适）在轻率鲁莽、恬不知耻的（我加的）科技互通、性欲相通的过程中驾驶机甲（我呸），这与《EVA》颇为相似，两部作品都将军国主义的发展与男孩变成男人的成熟阶段结合了起来。挥刀舞枪是男孩的工作，给出致命一击的却是男人。
Many mecha movies and series have imagined a communion of the human and the machine. “Evangelion” was perhaps the first to imagine the human as machine, and vice versa. The EVAs are both primal antecessors and evolved descendants of humans; occasionally, the two beings are one and the same. What the show introduced to the genre—and to a generation—was the Mary Shelley touch: the horror of not just the monster, who is created by the union of life and science, but the creature’s resemblance, in all of its grotesqueness, to the creator, absorbing him to become something new—something limitless, and more frightening than before.
许多机甲类型的作品都曾构想过一个人与机器共通共存的世界。《EVA》可能是首次认为人类也是一种机器的作品（反之亦然）。EVA是原始与未来人类的结合体；有的时候，他们二者合二为一了。《EVA》给这个流派、乃至我们这一代人带来的是玛丽·雪莱（Mary Shelley）般的启迪：以科技和生命技术构造的怪兽不是唯一可怕的因素了；这些怪诞的生灵将造物主们吞噬，它们的融合产生了新的生物————永无止境的暴走，比之前更令人恐惧。（D区）
Why Writers Should Learn Math
为什么作家要学数学
By Alexander Nazaryan
亚历山大·纳扎杨
November 2, 2012
2012年11月2日
In 1998, the New York Times wrote about a performance by the Fort Worth Ballet, singling out a male dancer for “his surprisingly fluid strength” while lamenting his lack of “soaring leaps” and “lively pirouettes” in a challenging routine that included Balanchine’s “Firebird.” If that seems like tepid praise, consider that the dancer was Herschel Walker, then a running back for the Dallas Cowboys. Walker had studied ballet at the University of Georgia, and while what he learned in the dance studio cannot alone account for his eight thousand two hundred and twenty-five career rushing yards, it surely fooled a linebacker or two. Nor is Walker the only football player to have seriously studied ballet: the Hall of Famer Lynn Swann is the subject of an NFL Films featurette titled “Baryshnikov in Cleats.”
《纽约时报》于1998年发表了一篇关于美国华兹堡芭蕾中心的文章，其中着重描写了一名具有“非凡流线型力量”同时缺少“大跳”以及“流畅旋转动作”男性舞者。他的动作难度挑战性高，甚至还做了了乔治·巴兰钦（George Balanchine）在《火鸟》（Firebird）里的动作。如果大家觉得这篇文章只不过是一篇不温不火的表演可就大错特错了。他是赫谢尔·沃克（Herschel Walker），达拉斯牛仔队赫赫有名的跑卫。沃克在乔治亚大学学习过芭蕾。尽管他在舞蹈工作室里的学到的东西不能单单拿来成就自己的NFLMVP称号以及多达8225码的生涯跑阵码数，那些芭蕾技巧被他用来晃过一两个线卫还是没问题的。沃克还不是唯一认真研习过芭蕾的橄榄球运动员：NFL名人堂成员林恩·斯万（Lynn Swann）还是NFL一部电影的的主角，大家称他为《穿橄榄球鞋的巴瑞辛尼科夫》（Baryshnikov in Cleats）。
What ballet is to football players, mathematics is to writers, a discipline so beguiling and foreign, so close to a taboo, that it actually attracts a few intrepid souls by virtue of its impregnability. The few writers who have ventured headlong into high-level mathematics—Lewis Carroll, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace—have been among our most inventive in both the sentences they construct and the stories they create.
芭蕾于橄榄球运动员犹如数学之于作家一般。数学，这门看起来既诱人又遥远的学科，好似禁忌一般，以其铜墙铁壁、坚不可摧的特质俘获了少数勇士的芳心。这一小撮在高等数学丛林的冒险中积累了大量经验的作家，如刘易斯·卡罗尔（Lewis Carroll），托姆斯·平琼（Thomas Pynchon），大卫·福斯特·华莱士（David Foster Wallace），无论是他们的故事结构还是句式运用都充满了创造力。
As anyone who has taken a standardized test in the last half-century knows, math and “language arts” run on parallel tracks for much of one’s school career. Both begin with an emphasis on rote memorization of the basics: sentence diagrams, multiplication tables. Later, though, both disciplines become more heady: English class discards grammar in favor of the ideas lurking beneath textual surfaces, while math leaves off earthbound algebra, soaring along the ranges of calculus.
任何在这五十年内参加过标准化考试的人都明白，数学和“语言艺术”在大家的校园生活中是处于平行轨道中的。它们各自都以强调牢记基础知识为开端：句式图解，乘法口诀表。随之而来的是两个学科更加令人兴奋的变化：英语课堂抛弃了语法，而偏爱在文本结构的表象中搜寻隐藏的理念；与此同时，数学飞离了地球表面的代数，冲向了遥远的微积分领域。
By the time you’re old enough to drive, you’ve likely decided which region of the brain you plan to use in your adult life, and which you want nothing to do with beyond the minimum requirements imposed by modern society. Long gone are the days of the catholic scholar who could quote both Pindar and Newton with ease. As the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy noted in 1940’s “A Mathematician’s Apology,” perhaps the most eloquent defense of the subject on its aesthetic merits, “most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity.”
等你年纪大到能开车的那天，已经能决定自己将使用大脑的哪个部分来应付成年人的世界，又将运用哪个部分用来满足现代生活对人的最低要求。天主教学者们右手品达（Pindar）左手牛顿的时光已不复返。如剑桥数学家戈弗雷·哈罗德·哈迪（G.H. Hardy）在他的作品《一个数学家的辩白》（A Mathematician’s Apology）中提到的一般，对于数学之美最有力的辩护，就是“大多数人太害怕‘数学’这两个字，以至于他们在随时随地、心服口服地夸大自己没有学好数学的能力。”
Poets have been more conversant with mathematics than fiction writers, probably because they have to pay attention to the numerical qualities of words when working in meter, forced to consider the form and even physical shape of what they write, not just its meaning. Wordsworth praised “poetry and geometric truth” for “their high privilege of lasting life,” while Edna St. Vincent Millay remarked that “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.”
诗人在数学圈子里比小说家更受欢迎，大抵是由于诗人们更注重遣词造句中的数值特征，迫使他们更关心文字的排列甚至是作品段落形状，而非仅仅将重点放在辞义上。威廉·华兹华斯（William Wordsworth）赞颂“诗歌及几何的真理”，只因它们拥有“经久不衰生命中的至高特权”，而埃德娜·圣·文森特·米莱（Edna St. Vincent Millay）[^美国历史上第一位得到普利兹诗歌奖的女性]同样也在自己的十四行诗《只有欧几里德见过赤裸之美》中重申了这一点。
Fiction writers have rarely expressed such earnest appreciation for mathematical aesthetics. That’s a shame, because mathematical precision and imagination can be a salve to a literature that is drowning in vagueness of language and theme. “The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics,” Ernest Hemingway wrote to Maxwell Perkins, in 1945. Even if Papa never had much formal training in mathematics, he understood it as a discipline in which problems are solved through a sort of plodding ingenuity. The very best passages of Hemingway have the mathematical complexity of a fractal: a seemingly simple formula that, in its recurrence, causes slight but crucial changes over time. Take, for example, the famous retreat from Caporetto in “A Farewell to Arms”:
极少数小说家能表达出对数学之美的深切爱恋，这非常可耻。数学的精确性和想象力足以拯救当下在文学作品中泛滥成灾的、空洞无味的语言和缺乏深意的主题。1945年，海明威在给麦克斯威尔·珀金斯（Maxwell Perkins）的信里写道：“散文写作的法则如同飞行、数学和物理学一样有章可循，不可动摇”。尽管海明威从未正式学过数学，他也懂得数学的理念能被用来解决问题————孜孜不倦地打磨出创造力。海明威最具有数学分型复杂度的段落：一个看起来很简单的公式，一再地重复，随着时间变更产生了微小但关键的变化。譬如在海明威著名的小说《永别了，武器》中卡波雷托一战，他是如此描写的：
When daylight came the storm was still blowing but the snow had stopped. It had melted as it fell on the wet ground and now it was raining again. There was another attack just after daylight but it was unsuccessful. We expected an attack all day but it did not come until the sun was going down. The bombardment started to the south below the long wooded ridge where the Austrian guns were concentrated. We expected a bombardment but it did not come. Guns were firing from the field behind the village and the shells, going away, had a comfortable sound.
天亮时还在刮狂风，雪倒停了。掉在湿地上的雪已融化，而现在又下起雨来了。天刚亮，敌人又发动一次进攻，但是没有得逞。那天我们整天等待敌人来攻，一直等到太阳下山。在南面，那条长满树林的长山岭底下，奥军的大炮集中在那里，又开始炮轰了。我们也等待他们的炮轰，但是并没有来。村子后边田野上的大炮开起来了，听见炮弹从我们这边往外开，心里倒很舒服。
The procession here has an algebraic deliberateness, but that simplicity gives way to a complexity of meaning. Hemingway starts with the material (snow, wet, daylight, sun) only to end with the unexpected and intimate “comfortable sound” of the receding Austrian guns—a revelatory bit of naiveté on Frederic Henry’s part. Everything in this passage is intentional, from the plain imagery to the heightening of narrative urgency that comes with the repetition of “we expected.”
这个段落充满了代数般的审慎，但是简洁的文字最终为复杂的含义让步。海明威首先从对实体的描写开始（雪，湿润，阳光，太阳）最终却以奥军撤退的中的枪炮声——“舒服的声音”结束，意外又私密，从中读者还能感受到弗利德利克·亨利（Frederic Henry）的青涩感。在这段文字里，从朴实的想象到提升叙事紧急度的重复句式“我们等待着”，所有一切都是经过精心规划的。
Hardy hints upon this, too: “A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns…. The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test.” But fiction that does nothing but follow rules is cold arithmetic, no matter how beautiful it is. And there are, indeed, many “craftsmen” today who can write what reviewers call lapidary prose, but who don’t come even close to wielding the axes that shatter the frozen seas inside us. That Hemingway paragraph would be inert artifice were it not for the “comfortable sound” that captures the impossible yearning of soldiers about to be sent either to slaughter or the gray twilight of retreat. The objective observation that begins the paragraph flowers into an ironic condemnation of war.
戈弗雷·哈罗德·哈迪也在他的书里提到了这一点：“数学家，就像画家、诗人一样，都是模式的创制者。。。正像画家和诗人的模式一样，数学家的模式也必须是优美的；正像色彩和文字一样，数学家的思想也必须和谐一致。美可是第一关。“但是，只遵循规则的小说，哪怕模式再优美，也仅仅是冷酷无情的算术而已。现今的确有很多的“文字匠人”能写出评论家们称之为“简洁优雅的散文”，然而他们却远远比不上那些能在人们内心深处披荆斩棘，融化心墙的人。海明威那段关于炸弹“令人很舒服”声音（comfortable sound）的描写捕捉到了即将上战场或即将被屠杀抑或即将踏上撤退之路的士兵们的渴望，如果没有这些描写，这些文字只不过是懒惰的炫技而已。整段文字开头关于战场的客观描写，最终结成了对战争讽刺谴责的点睛之笔。
As the mathematician Terence Tao has written, math study has three stages: the “pre-rigorous,” in which basic rules are learned, the theoretical “rigorous” stage, and, last and most intriguing, “the post-rigorous,” in which intuition suddenly starts to play a part. As Tao notes, “It is only with a combination of both rigorous formalism and good intuition that one can tackle complex mathematical problems; one needs the former to correctly deal with the fine details, and the latter to correctly deal with the big picture. Without one or the other, you will spend a lot of time blundering around in the dark.”
美即华裔数学家陶哲轩(Terence Tao)曾在他的博客中写道，数学学习有三个阶段：“前严格”时期——学习最基本的规则，理论“严格”时期，然后是最复杂的“后严格时期”——在这个阶段个人直觉突然开始发挥作用。陶哲轩称，“只有把严格和直觉结合起来你才可以解决那些深奥的数学问题；你需要使用严格枯燥的定理去准确处理细节，需要使用直觉来纵观全局、指导细节。缺少任何一个因素，你只会在黑暗中踉踉跄跄，浪费时间。”
In literature, that big picture means you have to extrapolate to people who are not yourself, which can be a risk as great as the potential reward—as, for example, William Styron found out when he tried to write from the voice of the rebel slave Nat Turner, quickly discovering himself branded a racist. The postmodernism of the late twentieth century, for all its excesses, at least understood that the world was now far too much with us, and fiction must tune into the frequencies of the age. David Foster Wallace came as close as anyone in the last half-century to finding that universal frequency. Wallace may have led a largely hermetic existence, and his novels aren’t exactly supermarket thrillers, but his fiction was obsessively concerned with the gulf between our small and discrete selves and the world at large.
在文学作品中，纵观全局意味着你必须仔细推测笔下人物的行为方式。因为笔下的人物并不是你自己，这个过程可以说是风险与机遇并存，就像美国当代著名小说家威廉·斯泰伦(William Styron)的经历一般。他用美国著名反叛奴隶奈特·特纳（Nat Turner）的口吻来发声，很快便发现自己的观点带有种族主义者的烙印。20世纪后现代主义尽管泛滥成灾，但他们至少承认了世界已成为人类社会不可承受之轻，而小说必须紧随时代的频率。在20世纪后半世纪，只有大卫·佛斯特·华莱士（David Foster Wallace）比任何人都接近这个频率。大体上他也许能被人们称为“隐士”；他的书也不是超市里贩卖的廉价畅销惊悚小说，但他的小说的确着重讨论了人类个体渺小而分崩离析的自我与整个世界的分歧。
A serious student of math in his youth, he had switched to philosophy by high school because high-level calculus did not provide the “click” of enlightenment, as D. T. Max describes in his new biography of Wallace, “Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story.” But even though Wallace may have foresworn mathematics, he never cast off the broadening spirit of the discipline. If Hemingway’s writing is algebraic in its precision, then Wallace’s is quantum calculus, a discipline that taxes the imagination by asking us to conceptualize things we cannot see, like the the way a function shows change through space and time. We must employ our private intellects to conceive forms that are, as Plato would have it, both timeless and universal. Not bad work if you can get it.
华莱士年轻的时候是个严肃的数学学生，高年级的学习方向却改成了哲学。D·T·曼克斯(D. T. Max)在华莱士的新传记《每一个爱情故事都是鬼故事》（Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story）中描述了他转变的原因是高等微积分无法给他带来启迪和顿悟。然而，即使华莱士曾经放弃数学，他却从未停止过拓宽自己数学精神的道路。如果我们把海明威的写作称为精确的代数，那么华莱士的文字就是量子微积分，让我们放飞想象力,让我们将看不见的物体和概念实体化，就像方程式f(t,s)在时间(t)和空间(s)的流转中展现的变化那般。我们必须卯足劲，用尽每个人积累的人生智慧才能体会到柏拉图当年说理解到的，亘古通今、包揽万物的宇宙形态。
In a 2000 review of two mathematical novels in the magazine Science, Wallace wrote about “the particular blend of reason and ecstatic creativity that characterized what is best about the human mind”: “Just about anyone lucky enough ever to have studied higher math understands what a pity it is that most students never pursue the subject past its introductory levels and therefore know only the dry and brutal problem solving of Calc I or Intro Stats…. Those who’ve been privileged (or forced) to study it understand that the practice of higher mathematics is, in fact, ‘an art’ and that it depends no less than other arts on inspiration, courage, toil, etc.”
2000年，《科学》杂志刊登了一篇华莱士关于两本数学小说的书评。他写道，”（数学）是逻辑论证与激动人心创造力的美妙调和物，而这恰恰是人类思想的最佳代言品“：“任何一个曾有幸学习过高等数学的人都能明白，大多数从未跨过数学初级学习阶段、只懂得用微积分第一册或者统计学导论里干巴巴的知识来暴力解题的学生是多么可惜。。。那些拥有学习优势（或被强迫着学习）的人才能理解高等数学是一门“艺术”。和其他种类的艺术一样，数学的推凿也离不开灵感、勇气和埋头苦干的精神，等等。“
Courage is not a word I’d use to describe a lot of today’s fiction. Writing, M.F.A. students are often told, is a messy exploration of the self. The result can be a suffocating narcissism, a lack of interest in the kind of extrapolation and exploration that is necessary to both mathematics and literature. In his landmark 1921 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot wrote, “What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality…. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science.” He went to compare the mind of an artist to a crucible in which a chemical reaction takes place.
“勇气”这两个字可不会是我用来描写现今小说的词。艺术硕士研究生们常常被灌输这种思想：写作是一段在混沌中自我探索的过程。这过程的结局常常是令人窒息的窥镜自怜，并且笔下的文字在推断和探索，这两个对数学及文学都十分重要的特点上缺乏趣味。T.S.艾略特（T. S. Eliot）在1921年他的代表作《传统与个人才能》中写道，“结果是，自己臣服于某种更有价值的东西。艺术家的进步意味着持续不断的自我牺牲，持续不断的个性消亡…正是在个性消灭中，艺术更加接近了科学”。他将艺术家的思维比作产生化学反应的坩埚。
Presently, we have become too enthralled by the notion of literature as Jackson Pollock action painting, the id flung with violence upon the canvas. The most lasting fiction has both the supremely balanced palette of Rothko and the grandeur of his themes. All this may seem like I am urging for a literature that is cold and scientific, subjecting itself to the rigors of an alien discipline. That isn’t so. I am pleading, instead, that fiction think more deeply and determinedly about how it is to be composed and what it is to say—that is the best gift mathematics could give us.
现在，杰克逊·波洛克（Jackson Pollock）泼洒画流派般的文学艺术理念让我们过分痴迷，本我随颜料被暴力地泼向作画帆布上。而最经久不衰的小说作品却应该像马克·罗斯科（Mark Rothko）完美平衡的调色板一般，成为其调色主题集大成之作。看起来，我所做的一切不过是号召大家创作冰冷无情、科技感十足、主题不外乎外星相关的文学作品，其实不然。我希望大家能跳出这一套思路来，让小说更有深度、思路更加坚定、行文更加果断——这是数学能给我们最好的礼物。
“I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art,” Hardy, the Cambridge mathematician, wrote. He meant creative in the most literal sense, contrasting serious mathematical inquiry with chess. The latter, too, requires great intelligence, but it resolves nothing of the human condition. The same distinction exists in fiction, between the diverting and the serious, the trivial and the universal. In both cases, too, formulas are but guideposts that fall away the higher you climb. In the end, you are left alone with your own variables, your own private equations.
剑桥数学家戈弗雷·哈罗德·哈迪曾写道，“我对数学这门学科感兴趣，仅仅是因为它是一门创意艺术”。他所指的“创意”是字面意义上的，而非复杂严肃的围棋之数学原理应用。他所指的“艺术”也一样，需要大智慧，但确解决不了复杂的人类问题。小说同样存在严肃和活泼、琐碎和宇宙的分歧。然而，不管是小说亦或是数学，方程式只是你攀登高峰的指路牌，随着脚步渐行渐远。最终，你只能和你自己的变量、你自己的等式一道，孤身前行。
Trucking as a State of Mind
卡车之心
By Joshua Rothman
约书亚·罗斯曼
July 11, 2017
Finn Murphy’s “The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road” is an occupational memoir with a previously untold human story at its center.
芬·墨菲《长途运输：一名卡车司机在路上的人生》是一本职业回忆录，记录了那些从未被讲述的人生故事。
Finn Murphy arrived for his first day of work at Callahan Bros. Moving & Storage on May 22, 1976. He had just turned eighteen. In the fall, he would be starting at Colby College; his parents were churchgoing golfers from Cos Cob, Connecticut, who imagined a professional career for their son. Murphy had different ideas. He liked the cardboard-box smell of the Callahan office and admired the movers, who wore T-shirts brined with sweat. Later that day, he helped carry a four-hundred-pound lateral file down a set of winding stairs. When it slipped, he writes, in “The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road,” its “metal edge carved a crimson serpent down the inside of my forearm.” Inspecting the cut, Murphy thought, “First blood.” He was angry with his parents and with society in general; he wanted “tough work for tough men.” At Colby, he smoked a lot of pot and conducted an independent study about the economics of the long-haul-moving industry. After his junior year, he dropped out to become a mover full time. “From now on, I’ll be the captain of my ship and the master of my soul,” he recalls thinking. “To put it another way: Screw you, everybody.”
1976年5月22日，芬·墨菲在卡拉汉兄弟搬家及仓储公司（Callahan Bros. Moving & Storage）开始了自己第一份工作。那时他是个刚满18岁的小伙子。当年秋天，他应该在缅因州的科尔比学院（Colby College）开始自己的大学学业；他的父母是康涅狄格州的科斯科布市（Cos Cob, Connecticut）虔诚的教徒，同时也是高尔夫球手。他俩正期待着自己的孩子能成走职业高尔夫路线。然而芬·墨菲可不这么想。他喜欢的是搬家公司办公室里纸板箱的气味和穿着汗唧唧T恤的搬运工。当天晚些时候，他沿着长长的螺旋楼梯帮着搬了一件重约400磅的横排文件柜。柜子没拿稳，他在《长途运输：一名卡车司机在路上的人生》中写道，“它的金属边缘沿着我的前臂内侧，划了一道长长的，像猩红祥龙一样的伤疤。”墨菲一边观察伤口一边想，“第一滴血”。他一直对父母及社会心存不满；他想要一个给“硬汉的困难活”。在科尔比学院，他嗨了许多草之后独自对长途运输及搬运产业进行了经济学研究。刚过完大一他就退学了，成了一名全职搬运工。“从今天开始，我是我自己的船长，是我心灵的主人[^原文为I’ll be the captain of my ship and the master of my soul. 来自英国诗人威廉·埃内斯特·亨利名篇《不可征服》中”I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.”一句，疑为芬·墨菲的口误]，”他回忆道，“或者换句话说吧：大家好，我去你们大爷的。”
A mood of mystery surrounds movers and truckers. Like priests, movers shepherd us through life’s transitions; like cowboys, truckers drive the roads we’ll never know. Both see America in ways the rest of us don’t. In “The Long Haul,” Murphy, who specializes in long-distance moves and drives an eighteen-wheeler, promises to bring us into his semi-mythic world. And yet Murphy himself is the book’s real mystery. In the 1970 film “Five Easy Pieces,” Jack Nicholson played Bobby Dupea, a classical pianist who gives up music to work on an oil rig. By turns, Bobby was charming and contemptuous, contemplative and enraged, wise and impulsive, truculent and loose. Murphy, another prepster gone rogue, is all of these things, too, and one spends much of the book wondering what drives him. Like Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” and Henry Marsh’s “Do No Harm,” “The Long Haul” is an occupational memoir with an untold human story at its center. In crushingly hard work, Murphy seems to be escaping from himself.
搬运工和卡车司机周遭有一股神秘的氛围。如同神父一般，搬运工像牧羊人一样带领我们渡过人生中起承转合；如同牛仔一般，卡车司机驰骋在我们永远未知的路上。这两种职业眼里的美国和我们这些常人看到的可不一样。这本书里，驾驶着十八轮大卡车、专精于长途运输的作者墨菲，誓将带领我们进入他半神话的世界。然而墨菲自己才是本书的神话本尊。在1970年上映的电影《五只歌》中，杰克·尼科尔森扮演的巴比·杜皮亚是一名放弃音乐，奔向石油平台的古典钢琴演奏家。自然的，巴比在电影中集魅力四射又轻蔑自负，沉静自若又暴跳如雷，好勇斗狠又自由放荡于一身。墨菲，另一个跑偏了的辍学孩子，也同样如此。他在书中着重描写了事情为什么变成这样的原因。像安东尼·伯尔顿（Anthony Bourdain）的《后厨机密》（Kitchen Confidential）以及亨利·马什（Henry Marsh）的《医生的抉择》（Do No Harm）一样，本作是一本揭秘人生路的职业回忆录。在累翻天的苦活里，墨菲好像逃离了自己。
Much of “The Long Haul” focusses on the mechanics of long-haul moving. It’s cyclical work that begins and ends with a trailer resembling “an operating room scrubbed for the next surgery.” In between, there’s a lot of packing, lifting, loading, and hauling. The furniture is always heavy; the driving is often terrifying; the combination darkly absurd. Early in the book, on a journey from Fairfield, Connecticut, to Aspen, Colorado, Murphy, in the Rockies, descends the twelve-thousand-foot Loveland Pass. The hairpins are covered in ice and slush. His fifty-three-foot trailer weighs twenty thousand pounds and contains furniture belonging to “a former investment banker from a former investment bank who apparently escaped the toppled citadel with his personal loot intact”—including eight six-hundred-pound Qing-dynasty tombstones. “I downshift my thirteen-speed transmission to fifth gear, slow to 23 mph, and set my Jake brake to all eight cylinders,” Murphy writes. As the brakes struggle to resist the truck’s momentum, the whole cab shudders and Murphy’s arms shake. A jackknife seems imminent. At such moments Murphy’s life resembles “Mad Max” and “Antiques Roadshow” combined.
这本书绝大部分都在描写长距离运输的运作方式。作品以“像’在等待下一场手术般冲刷干净的手术室‘的挂车”作为开头，又以其作为结尾，首尾呼应。书中充斥着许多物料包装、起重、装卸以及运输的内容。家具一直沉甸甸的；驾驶过程常常触目惊心；两者结合起来就非常黑色幽默了。作品前部分，墨菲描述了他从康涅狄格州费尔菲尔德（Fairfield, Connecticut）到科罗拉多州阿斯彭（Aspen, Colorado）的一段历险。爱之地峡道（Loveland Pass）位于海拔高达12000尺（约3636米）的落基山脉里，冰和浮雪覆盖着发卡弯。墨菲拖着他长达53尺（约16米）的挂车，运着重约20000磅（约9吨）的家具沿着道路向下俯冲。这些家具属于“一位曾在投行工作的银行家。很显然他在城堡被攻破时成功逃难，且个人收藏毫发无损”—运送的家具里甚至还有8块600磅重的秦代墓碑。“我把我的13速变速器减到5档，车速踩到23迈，将发动机八个气缸都进行了制动”，墨菲写到。发动机制动一边和卡车猛冲的惯性搏斗，一边带着车头和墨菲的胳膊剧烈颤抖。车头和挂车不出意外地折刀了。这时墨菲的人生简直像是美国电影《疯狂麦克斯》（Mad Max）和《鉴宝路演》（Antiques Roadshow）的结合体。
Murphy likes “low company and hard work,” but also has a crush on Terry Gross and reads “Mansfield Park” in the sleeper of his cab. Is trucking really the right life for him? Midway through “The Long Haul,” he gets fed up with life on the road and quits. Two decades later—after he’s “washed ashore in a city out West” with “no job, no plans, no nothing”—he returns to it, determined “to approach the work with serious intellectual intention toward performing even the smallest tasks properly.” Earlier this year, in a book called “Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy,” the sociologist Richard Ocejo investigated why certain blue-collar jobs—butcher, barber, bartender, distiller—have become suddenly prestigious while others have not. “Why are there no ‘cool’ plumbers, electricians, or maintenance workers?” Ocejo asks. He finds that only certain kinds of work are seen as having the “philosophical underpinnings” that—once they are enacted theatrically—give manual laborers the intellectual aura of knowledge workers. At times, Murphy seems determined to unearth a philosophy of long-haul moving. His goal is to practice moving and trucking in an elevated way.
墨菲喜欢“下等人和苦差事”，但同样钟情于特里·格罗斯（Terry Gross）[^NPR“新鲜空气”栏目的主持人和联合执行制片人。该栏目曾获美国皮博迪奖，是全球广播电视媒体界历史最悠久最具权威的奖项。节目内容以人文、艺术、科学为主]，也在睡眠舱里读简·奥斯汀的《曼斯菲尔德庄园》（Mansfield Park）。开卡车真的适合他吗？在书的中间部分，墨菲对于在路上的生活感到厌倦，离开了这个行当。过了20年，“在西部的某个城市被海浪冲刷到岸上”的他，“没有工作，没有计划，一无所有”之后，重新回来了，下决心要“用最严肃、最聚精会神的方式对待工作，即使对最无关紧要的任务也要认真对待”。社会学家理查德·奥赛霍（Richard Ocejo）在今年早些时候发表了作品《手艺大师：新城市经济中的旧工作》（Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy）。其中他研究了为什么某些蓝领阶层的工作——屠夫、理发师、调酒师、酿酒师——突然拥有了大批疯狂拥趸。奥赛霍问，“为什么没有酷炫的水管工、电工或者是维修工人呢？”他发现只有某些工作才被人们认为具有“哲学思想基础”——戏剧化的表现赋予这些手艺人脑力劳动者的智慧光环。有的时候，墨菲看起来像是在深挖长途运输行业中的哲学理念。他的目标是用自己的高姿态践行运输及卡车事业。
To articulate this philosophy, Murphy devotes much of “The Long Haul” to the nuances of moving. He compares loading boxes into the truck to an athletic version of Tetris. (A well-loaded trailer contains many “tiers” of furniture, with heavy items on the bottom and smaller, odd-shaped items, called “chowder,” on top; a good mover can walk around a house and build tiers in his head.) As a “boutique” mover specializing in high-end relocations, Murphy—like Don Ainsworth, the dangerous-goods trucker in John McPhee’s “A Fleet of One”—owns and operates his own truck. He hires his own moving teams, and, in partnership with a dispatcher, sets his own schedule—a never-ending sprint of packing, driving, and unpacking. He stays awake with the help of “Dr Cola”—a combination of Coke and Dr Pepper—and saves time and money by sleeping in his cab. Regular truckers, called “freighthaulers,” are “gearheads” who boast about their powerful trucks and look down on movers as “bedbuggers.” They are also employees of big shipping companies who often live hand to mouth. Murphy may be knee-deep in the “muddy, filth-strewn, windblown end of the American cesspit”—packing boxes in the attic of an elderly hoarder, say, with a crew of probable felons he recruited at a local bar—but he makes around two hundred thousand dollars a year. (He looks down, too, on the clichéd freighthauler aesthetic: country music, big belt buckles, tattoos.)
墨菲的哲学在作品中表达得很明白。《长途运输》中大部分篇幅都用来描写搬运的细致之处。他将往卡车上挪箱子的过程比喻为运动版的俄罗斯方块。（在一辆摆放合理的挂车里，家具是“分级”的，重物在下部，小型、外形不规则的物体叫做“海鲜杂烩汤”，放在上面；一个优秀的搬运工在围着房子转一圈之后就能在脑子里给家具分级了。）“经典老派“搬运工专职于高档住宅搬家，墨菲像约翰·麦克菲（John McPhee）《一只舰队》（A Fleet of One）文中的危险品运输卡车司机唐·艾因斯沃斯（Don Ainsworth）一样，用自己的卡车运货。墨菲有自己的搬运队伍，并与调度员合作来安排运输计划——他们的干劲永无止境，包装，运送，拆卸一条龙。他用一种叫“可乐博士”——混合了可乐和胡椒博士的饮料保持清醒，这样还能节省在车里打瞌睡的时间。一般的卡车司机，自诩为“拉货人”（freighthaulers），是一群“机械控”（gearheads），他们喜欢吹嘘自己的卡车参数优良，性能非凡，还看不起搬运工，称其为“臭虫”。这些卡车司机也是大型货运公司的员工，靠运货勉强度日。墨菲也许是那种将双膝跪在“泥糊糊、满是污物、被风吹的乱七八糟的美式粪坑”里、与一群可能是从当地酒吧里召集来的重刑犯、在老“葛朗台”家的阁楼里一起打包箱子的人——但是他一年差不多能赚20万美元。（他同样看不起那些陈词滥调的拉货人审美：乡村音乐，夸张的大皮带扣和纹身。）
Out on “the big slab”—the highway—truckers are responsible for checking the connectors and couplings that link their cabs to their trailers, and for monitoring tire pressure (a big job when there are eighteen tires). In a similar way, they must maintain psychological equilibrium. Drivers find solace in loose, anonymous fellowship. In a coin-operated truckstop shower in Kittery, Maine, another trucker approaches Murphy (“Now don’t get all edgy there, driver”), introduces himself as “Lone Ranger” (his C.B. handle; Murphy’s is “U-Turn”), and shares his life story. On the road, drivers use the radio to warn each other about hazards—natural and man-made (“Kojak with a Kodak 201 sunset” means “a state trooper has a radar gun at mile-marker 201 on the westbound side”). One night in South Carolina, Murphy finds himself “running convoy” with nine other trucks. For a hundred and thirty miles, the convoy, carrying fresh flowers, steel, and hot tubs, drives sixty-five, undisturbed by “four-wheelers” (that is, by regular cars). “There was a plane of consciousness that we had together,” Murphy writes. “It’s the closest thing to a Zen experience I know except when I’m in my loading trance.”
在“大混凝土”——高速公路上——卡车司机得负责检查连接器，把车头和挂车接好，检测胎压（对于有18个轮胎的大卡车来说可是个费劲活儿）。同样的，他们还得保持心理健康和平衡。司机们能在在松散的，匿名的关系中获得平静和安慰。在缅因州基特里（Kittery, Maine）的一个卡车服务区投币浴室里，另一个司机跟墨菲搭话（“别紧张，伙计”），他称自己为“独行侠”（这是他在卡车电台[^民用波段无线电，C.B. Radio]的绰号；墨菲的绰号叫“U形弯”），并分享了他的人生故事。在路上，司机们用电台交流，并相互提醒路上的天灾人祸（“探科杰克带着柯达在201落日地区“意思是”州警在自东向西201英里的牌子那儿用雷达枪测速“）。在南加州的一晚，墨菲和九辆卡车开启了“护航模式”。护航舰队满载着鲜花，钢铁，浴缸，以每小时65英里（约104km/h）的速度驰骋在530英里长的路上，丝毫不受“小四轮”（即小轿车）的影响。“当时所有人都在一个属于我们自己的意识平台上”，墨菲写道。“这是除了我装货出神之外最接近禅修的经历。”
Murphy understands himself as a chronicler of American decline. He reports that quality American furniture has disappeared—it’s been replaced by ikea—and that no one owns books anymore. Hauling cross-country means “breezing through one dead or dying town after another” in a landscape that “looks like an episode from ‘The Walking Dead’ ”; everywhere, rings of chain stores and pawnshops surround decaying post-industrial downtowns. Murphy concludes that, outside of the big cities, university towns are the only good places left. Ruminating on American tourism posters—apple orchards in New England, porch swings down South, cowboys out West—he writes, “If a tourist poster of America were made with some verisimilitude, it would show a Subway franchise inside a convenience-store gas station with an under-paid immigrant mopping the floor and a street person at the traffic light holding a cardboard sign that reads anything helps.”
墨菲觉得自己是美国衰落史的见证人。在他的作品中，优质经典的美式家具不见了——取而代之的是宜家家具——大家家里都没书了。穿越全美意味着“在一个又一个的死城，亦或将死之城里”顺利通行，城里的景色“像极了美剧《行尸走肉》（The Walking Dead）“。在哪儿人们都能看见挂着铃铛的当铺和连锁商店，围绕着气数将尽的后工业革命时代城市。墨菲总结说，大城市外，只有大学城是留下不多的好地方。仔细观察美国旅游海报后——新英格兰的苹果园，南边的秋千椅，西部牛仔——他写道，“如果给美国游客们的海报能描述的真实一些，那么我们看到的就是便利店里的铁路纪念品，加油站里钱少的可怜的一名移民正在墩地，红绿灯下流浪汉举着‘我什么都要’的牌子。”
Out of this windblown hellscape, Murphy emerges to move your stuff. One customer, or “shipper,” is a colonel in the Army; he tells Murphy that, in his opinion, movers are “a bunch of undisciplined vagabonds.” Murphy agrees, but, all the same, is a calming force. He helps “snowbirds” settle into retirement and, when a shipper dies, facilitates his Native American burial ceremony. Murphy laments the “wall of suspicion and enmity” that exists between shippers and movers, and notes that it often has a racial component. One suspicious couple videotapes Murphy and his Latino crew while they work; another prohibits them from using the bathrooms in the house, insisting that they use a porta-potty. The men bristle but get the job done. The best movers, he suggests, bear the weight of their shippers’ weaknesses.
在这风雨飘零的地狱场景里，墨菲仍然沉浸于运送货物。一个客户，或者我们成为“托运人”是个上校。他告诉墨菲，他认为搬运工是“一帮不守规矩的无业游民。”墨菲也同意这个观点。但是这帮人同样是令人平静的力量。他帮助“雪鸟”[^北方居民迁徙到南方]退休后在南方定居。当客户不幸过世，他还会帮着举行印第安人传统葬礼仪式。墨菲痛恨客户和搬运工之间的“怀疑、敌意之墙”，并且发现这些举动常常与种族因素相关。一对疑心重重的夫妇给墨菲和他的拉丁裔搬运工干活的时候视频录像；还有人不让他们用房子里的洗手间，坚持让他们去“移动厕所”。搬运工们强忍怒气但也能把活干了。墨菲认为，最好的搬运工是那些能承受托运人弱点之重的人。
Murphy takes pride in helping his shippers, but you sense that his heart is elsewhere. At the right speed, on the right stretch of highway, his truck becomes a time machine; Murphy’s flux capacitors engage and he’s transported back to a vanished, vigorous, manly America. He recalls a moment—on the New Jersey Turnpike, near Exit 12—when his “universe was firing on all cylinders”:
墨菲很自豪能帮助他的客户们运东西，但是你明显能感觉到他的心不在这儿。车速合适，高速路角度延伸地恰到好处时，他的卡车变成了一台时间机器。墨菲接上冲量电容器[^源自经典科幻电影《回到未來》]，回到了不复存在的生机勃勃、雄心壮志的美洲大陆。他回想起来一个瞬间—在新泽西收费高速公路12出口的地方—在那儿，他的“整个宇宙达到了巅峰状态”：
Yellow sodium arc lights from the factories, refineries, and warehouses discharged a murky stage-lit glow onto the gantry towers at Port Elizabeth. The horizon was broken by steel girders, steel cranes, steel storage tanks, steel trains, steel bridges, and steel ships. I had “Born to Run” blasting out from the oversize speakers . . . . I’ve got a hard-muscled body, a big, comfortable, new tractor hauling a 53-foot moving trailer, grooving with my killer sound system, a 30-ounce Dr Cola in the holder. There’s the whistle of the supercharger as I shift into thirteenth gear, the whoosh of the air dryer, my mouth slightly sour, arms shaking from the pounding of the wheel, making money, setting my own schedule, the Manhattan skyline on my right, flying fast and furious on my way up to home plate in Connecticut.
工厂、炼油厂和仓库里的黄色钠弧灯给伊丽莎白港的塔式龙门起重机蒙上了一层昏暗的舞台光。破碎的视野里满是钢桁梁，钢阀门，钢储罐，钢列车，钢桥和钢船。车载超大喇叭音箱嘶吼着“注定逃亡”[^布鲁斯·斯普林斯汀（Bruce Springsteen）的成名曲之一《Born to run》]。我一身腱子肉，驾驶着又大又舒适的新型卡车，身后拉着16米长的拖车，随着牛x的音响系统打着拍子，饮料架上还安着30盎司（约合887毫升）的可乐博士。机械增压器在我挂到13档时发出音哨，干燥罐嗖嗖作响，我能感觉到嘴里稍稍有点酸味。我捶着方向盘的手震动着，赚着钞票，设定着计划，曼哈顿天际线在我右边迅猛飞跃，陪着我回到康乃狄格州的家。
“Me and the monster truck are hurtling through sixteen lanes of the most intense, dangerous, and exhilarating piece of roadway ever devised by man,” Murphy concludes, “and I’m the king of it all with my truck, my tunes, and my big independence.” In triumphant solitude, he feels like a trucker should. Then again, “Born to Run” isn’t about being “the king of it all”—it’s a sad, desperate, revved-up love song about longing to escape at any cost. What stays in your mind at the end of “The Long Haul” is that feeling of flight.
“我和我的怪兽卡车在人类有史以来建造的十六条最险恶同时又最激动人心的路上疾驰，“墨菲总结道，”有了我的卡车，我的调调，加上我自力更生的好本事，我就是公路之王。“墨菲卡车司机的身份让他沉浸在凯旋的基调里。然而，“注定逃亡”可不是当”公路之王“——这是个主题为不惜一切代价逃离的悲伤、绝望的快节奏情歌。读完本作，读者内心中留下的是飞翔的感觉。
Philosophically, emotionally, practically, Murphy has found ways to feel at home while on the run. He’s made moving a way of life.
无论是哲学上，情感上还是精神生活中，墨菲都在奔波的路上找到了家一般的归属感。他让开卡车变成了一种属于自己的生活方式。
Is Noise Pollution the Next Big Public-Health Crisis?
噪音污染会成为下一个大型公共健康危机吗
Research shows that loud sound can have a significant impact on human health, as well as doing devastating damage to ecosystems.
研究表明噪音会对极大地健康人类影响，同时对生态环境造成毁灭性损害。
By David Owen
大卫·欧文
May 6, 2019
2019年5月6日
Noise is now seen as a factor in a range of ailments, including heart disease.
噪音现在被认为是一些列疾病的诱因，其中包括心脏病。
Mark and I sat at opposite ends of a long coffee table, in the living room, and his parents sat on the couch. He took off his earmuffs but didn’t put them away. “I was living in California and working in a noisy restaurant,” he said. “Somebody would drop a plate or do something loud, and I would have a flash of ear pain. I would just kind of think to myself, Wow, that hurt—why was nobody else bothered by that?” Then everything suddenly got much worse. Quiet sounds seemed loud to him, and loud sounds were unendurable. Discomfort from a single incident could last for days. He quit his job and moved back in with his parents. On his flight home, he leaned all the way forward in his seat and covered his ears with his hands.
小马和我坐在客厅长咖啡桌的两端，他的父母则坐在沙发上听我们谈话。他取下了耳罩但并没把耳罩收起来。“我以前住加州，在一个嘈杂的餐厅里工作”，他说，“有人会把盘子掉地上，或者干些别的特别大声的事儿。听到这些我的耳朵就会一跳一跳的疼。我当时想，哇，为什么其他人就不会这么遇到这种烦心事？”之后小马的情况越来越糟。很小的动静对他来说也很大，大一点的噪音他已经完全不能忍受，而且一次声音刺激带来的不适感会持续相当长的时间。之后他辞去工作，搬回父母家。在飞回家的航班上他只能把身体前倾，靠在椅子上，用双手紧紧捂住耳朵。
That was five years ago. Mark’s condition is called hyperacusis. It can be caused by overexposure to loud sounds, although no one knows why some people are more susceptible than others. There is no known cure. Before the onset of his symptoms, Mark lived a life that was noise-filled but similar to those of millions of his contemporaries: garage band, earbuds, crowded bars, concerts. The pain feels like “raw inflammation,” he said, and is accompanied by pressure on his ears and his temples, by tension in the back of his head, and, occasionally, by an especially disturbing form of tinnitus: “You and I would have a conversation, and then after you’d left I’d go upstairs and some phrase you had been saying would repeat over and over in my ear, almost like a song when they have the reverb going.” He manages his condition better than he did five years ago, but he still lives with his parents and doesn’t have a job. The day before my visit, he had winced when his father crumpled a plastic cookie package that he was putting in the recycling bin. By the end of our conversation, which lasted a little more than an hour, he had put his earmuffs back on.
这还只是五年前的情况。小马的症状在医学上叫听觉过敏。过度接触噪音是诱发症状的原因之一（虽然到现在我们还不清楚为什么有的人对噪音比别人更加敏感），而且迄今为止还没有治疗的方法。在小马听觉过敏前，他的生活环境与成千上百万人一样嘈杂，地下乐队啦，热闹酒吧啦，音乐会啦，入耳式耳塞等等。小马形容这个痛觉就像“活生生被火烧”一样，还伴随着太阳穴疼痛、耳压增高、后脑勺紧张等等，偶尔还会引发耳鸣。小马解释，“就好像咱俩刚刚说完话，你先撤了，但是我转身上楼之后你说过的话还在一遍又一遍在我脑子里重放，类似于播曲子的时候加了回声”。现在他的情况已经比五年前好多了，然而现在他仍然与父母住在一起，还找不到工作。就在我采访小马的前一天，他父亲摆放垃圾桶塑料袋的声音仍然让小马难受得龇牙咧嘴。结束这场差不多一个小时的谈话之后，小马又重新带上了他放在桌子上的耳罩。
Hyperacusis is relatively rare, and Mark’s case is severe, but hearing damage and other problems caused by excessively loud sound are increasingly common worldwide. Ears evolved in an acoustic environment that was nothing like the one we live in today. Daniel Fink—a retired California internist, whose own, milder hyperacusis began in a noisy restaurant on New Year’s Eve, 2007, and who is now an anti-noise activist—told me, “Until the industrial revolution, urban dwellers’ sleep was disturbed mostly by the early calls of roosters from back-yard chicken coops or nearby farms.” The first serious sufferers of occupational hearing loss were probably workers who pounded on metal: blacksmiths, church-bell ringers, the people who built the boilers that powered the steam engines that created the modern world. (Audiologists used to refer to a particular high-frequency hearing-loss pattern as a “boilermaker’s notch.”)
听觉过敏其实挺少见的，小马的状况算是严重案例了，但是听力损伤以及其他一些过度接触噪音所造成的疾病却在世界范围内越来越常见。人耳进化历史长河中所处的声音环境与现在我们生活的世界截然不同。丹尼尔芬克是加州的一名退休内科医生，他在2007年跨年夜一个纽约的热闹餐厅里不幸得上了中度听觉过敏。他现在是一名反噪音的积极行动分子：“直到工业革命前，基本上城镇居民每天早上都是被自家后院或者邻居家的公鸡打鸣声吵醒的”。第一批职业性失聪的人群主要和铸铁有关：铁匠、教堂敲钟人以及那些为建设现代世界而制造蒸汽机动力源泉—锅炉的人们。（声学家们一般将高频听力损伤的听力图呈现形式称为“锅炉制造工槽”）
Today, the sound source that people first think of when they think of hearing loss is amplified music, the appeal of which may be biological. In 1999, two scientists at the University of Manchester, in England, conducted an experiment in which they had students listen to songs at dance-club volumes, which are high enough to cause permanent damage if the exposures are long enough. The scientists concluded that the loud music stimulated the parts of the subjects’ inner ears that govern balance and spatial orientation, thereby creating “pleasurable sensations of self-motion”: crank up the volume, and you feel as though you’re dancing when you’re sitting in your seat. Classical musicians and their audiences face risks as well. For the musicians, the threat comes not just from their own instrument (violinists, like right-handed infantrymen, tend to lose hearing on their left side first) but also, often more significant, from the instruments of the musicians who sit behind them.
今天，当人们谈及什么会引起听力损伤时，第一个想到的是经过扩音的音乐。这看起来也很符合生物常理。1999年，两名英国曼彻斯特大学的科学家做了一个实验，他们安排学生听蹦迪舞厅里那么吵的音乐，长期处在这个声音环境中会造成听觉永久损伤。之后他们得出结论称，大音量音乐会调动内耳中控制平衡和空间感的部分，从而制造出一种“自己也在跟着音乐动的、令人愉悦的感觉”：扭大音量，就算坐在椅子上也好像在跳舞。古典音乐家和他们的观众同样面临这种危险。对于他们来说，威胁不仅仅来自于自己的乐器发出的声响（譬如小提琴家，像右撇子步兵一样，左耳更容易损失听力），更多地还来自于他们身旁音乐家乐器的发出的声音。
Modern sound-related health threats extend far beyond music, and they affect more than hearing. Studies have shown that people who live or work in loud environments are particularly susceptible to many alarming problems, including heart disease, high blood pressure, low birth weight, and all the physical, cognitive, and emotional issues that arise from being too distracted to focus on complex tasks and from never getting enough sleep. And the noise that we produce doesn’t harm only us. Scientists have begun to document the effects of human-generated sound on non-humans—effects that can be as devastating as those of more tangible forms of ecological desecration. Les Blomberg, the founder and executive director of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, based in Montpelier, Vermont, told me, “What we’re doing to our soundscape is littering it. It’s aural litter—acoustical litter—and, if you could see what you hear, it would look like piles and piles of McDonald’s wrappers, just thrown out the window as we go driving down the road.”
现代社会中与声音相关联的健康威胁不仅仅来源于音乐，所造成的健康后果也不仅仅是听力损伤。研究表明，在大音量环境中工作或生活的人群更容易惹上一些诸如心脏病、高血压、新生儿体重低以及一切认知、行为及情感问题的大麻烦，而这一切都来自于精力分散、无法集中精力完成复杂的工作以及睡眠不足。我们制造的噪音不仅会对人类造成伤害。有科学家已经开始记录人造音对非人生物的影响，这些影响的所造成的破坏性甚至和亵渎生态无异。莱斯·布鲁姆伯格（Les Blomberg）是一所名叫“噪音清除室”（Noise Pollution Clearinghouse）公司的创始人及董事长，该公司位于佛蒙特州的蒙彼利埃。他告诉我说，“我们对声音空间所作所为就是在乱扔垃圾，这是听觉和声学上的乱扔乱放。如果你把声音空间可视化，就能看见像我们开车在路上随手扔出窗外的麦当劳包装纸一样，到处都是一堆一堆的垃圾”。
In February, Bruitparif, a nonprofit organization that monitors environmental-noise levels in metropolitan Paris, published a report that combined medical projections from the World Health Organization with “noise maps” based partly on data from its own network of acoustic sensors. It concluded, among many other things, that an average resident of any of the loudest parts of the Île-de-France—which includes Paris and its surrounding suburbs—loses “more than three healthy life-years,” in the course of a lifetime, to some combination of ailments caused or exacerbated by the din of cars, trucks, airplanes, and trains. These health effects, according to guidelines published by the W.H.O.’s European regional office last year, include tinnitus, sleep disturbance, ischemic heart disease, obesity, diabetes, adverse birth outcomes, and cognitive impairment in children. In Western Europe, the guidelines say, traffic noise results in an annual loss of “at least one million healthy years of life.”
今年二月份，Bruitparif,一家位于巴黎城区的声音观察组织发布了一篇报告，它综合运用了世界卫生组织的医学预测以及“噪音地图”，地图部分数据采用的是该组织自身的声音感应器网络。该报告最引人注目的一条结论是，居住在法兰西岛最吵闹地区的居民——包括巴黎及周边一些郊区的行政区域—人均健康寿命将比其他地区的居民减少了至少三年。这主要是由各种汽车、卡车、飞机、火车的轰鸣声所带来的或加重的并发症所导致的。据去年世界卫生组织欧洲区域办事处发布的健康准则，这些健康影响包括耳鸣、睡眠障碍、冠心病、肥胖、糖尿病、不良妊娠结局以及儿童认知性障碍。该准则显示，交通噪音将导致西欧地区人群每年损耗“至少100万健康寿命”。
The headquarters of Bruitparif is in a low-rise office complex in Saint-Denis, a suburb just north of the Eighteenth Arrondissement. I visited a couple of weeks after the February report was issued, and met with Fanny Mietlicki, who has been Bruitparif’s director since 2005. She had warned me, before my trip, that she spoke very little English. I, on the other hand, speak French almost as well as my father did. He studied it in school, and was stationed in France at the end of the Second World War. Years later, at a restaurant in Paris, while travelling with my mother, he said something to a Frenchman sitting at the next table, and the Frenchman said something back. Neither man could understand the other, and my mother eventually identified the problem: the Frenchman didn’t realize that my father was speaking French, and my father didn’t realize that the Frenchman was speaking English.
Bruitparif的总部在巴黎十八区北边圣丹尼斯的一栋矮写字楼里。在他们二月份发布那篇报告之后的几个星期，我去拜访他们了，同时还与芬尼·米耶特利齐（Fanny Mietlicki）见了面。她从2005年起就开始担任Bruitparif的主任了。在我去见她之前，她就警告我说她的英语说的非常不好。我的法语呢，说的差不多和我爸一样好。他当时在学校读书，之后二战中被派往法国驻扎。很多年以后，我爸妈去巴黎玩儿，在餐厅用餐的时候，他对邻桌的法国人说了些什么，之后邻桌又说了些什么回来，而俩人都不明白对方在说些什么。我妈终于明白了问题的出在哪儿：法国人听不出来我爸在说法语，我爸听不出来法国人在说英语。
Mietlicki’s English turned out to be better than she’d let on. “You need to have data in order to know where to implement noise-abatement actions,” she told me. “Before Bruitparif, politicians were fighting to get money to construct noise barriers, but not necessarily where the most people live.” In 2014, Bruitparif was one of the principal creators of the Harmonica index, a way of presenting the severity of sound disturbances with a simple graph. Harmonica’s most appealing feature is that it makes no reference to decibels, which even acousticians have trouble explaining. (Part of the difficulty—but only part—is that decibels are logarithmic. A hundred-decibel sound isn’t twice as intense as a fifty-decibel sound; it’s a hundred thousand times as intense.)
结果米耶特利齐的英语比她描述的要好。她告诉我说，“你得好好整理数据，这样才能明白在哪儿施行消噪措施“。”在Bruitparif成立之前，政客们往往将重点放在争取更多资金来修建噪音屏障上，然而屏障放置的地方却不是大多数人生活的区域“。2014年，Bruitparif成了“悦耳指数”（Harmonica index）的几个主要创始机构之一，该指数用简单的图形展示了噪声的严重程度。悦耳指数最吸引人的一个特点是它并不使用分贝指数来测算噪音，这一点让声学家也很难解释明白。（部分难点，仅仅是部分难点在于——分贝是具有对数性质的。100分贝噪音大小并不是50分贝的两倍，而是成千上百倍的高。）
Bruitparif’s director of technology is Christophe Mietlicki, Fanny’s husband. He used to develop computer systems for financial institutions, but, in 2009, he decided that his wife’s job was more interesting than his, and went to work for her. They are in their forties, have three children, and commute each day from Suresnes, a suburb directly across the Seine from the Bois de Boulogne. At the headquarters, Christophe and I spoke in a sort of reception-and-recreation area on the floor below Fanny’s office. On one of the walls was a large noise map of Paris and its suburbs, on which roads, train lines, and airline flight paths had been highlighted in angry, glowing red, like inflamed nerves in an ad for a pain reliever. On a wooden table in front of the map was a white bowl that was filled with what appeared from a distance to be individually wrapped pieces of candy but turned out to be earplugs.
Bruitparif的技术总监是克里斯托弗·米耶特利齐（Christophe Mietlicki）, 芬尼的丈夫。他之前一直为金融机构开发电脑软件来着。然而到了2009年，他觉得妻子的工作比自己的有意思多了，于是辞掉工作来到了妻子的公司。他们俩四十多了，有三个孩子，每天从叙雷讷,一个连接了塞纳河及布洛涅森林的市郊，通勤往返巴黎。我和C克里斯托弗坐在Bruitparif总部一个类似于接待兼休闲区的地方聊天，这个区域就在芬尼办公室楼下。对着我们的一面墙上是一个巴黎及其市郊地区的噪音地图，上面画满了各类公路、铁路以及飞行线路，纵横交错。这些线路图被愤怒的红色线条高亮标记出来，看起来就像是缓解神经疼痛的止疼药广告一般。地图前面摆着一个木头桌子，上边放着一个白碗，远远看上去像是装满了独立包装的糖果，结果凑近一看确是满满一大碗耳塞。
We stepped into an adjacent room. “Here is our acoustic laboratory,” Christophe said. He handed me one of Bruitparif’s sound-monitoring devices, which he had helped invent. It’s called Medusa. It has four microphones, which stick out at various angles, hence the name. The armature that holds the microphones is bolted to a metal box roughly the size of an American loaf of bread. Inside it is a souped-up Raspberry Pi—a tiny, inexpensive computer, which was originally intended for use in schools and developing countries but is so powerful that it has been adopted, all over the world, for myriad other uses. (You can buy one on Amazon for less than forty bucks.) Embedded in the central microphone stalk are two tiny fish-eye cameras, mounted back to back, which record a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree image each minute. Medusas are the successors of Bruitparif’s first-generation sensors, called Sonopodes, which rely on expensive components imported from Japan. Sonopodes are still in use, although they are too big to move around easily. “The Japanese system is very good, but each one costs almost thirty thousand euros, and we can’t deploy it as much as we expect,” Christophe told me. “So we built our own system, which is small and low-cost. The idea is the same.” Bruitparif has installed fifty Medusas in the metropolitan area, and will add many more this summer.
接着我们迈进旁边的一间房子，“这就是我们的声学实验室了。”克里斯托弗说。他递给我一个他们机构的声音监听仪器，他也为开发这个尽了一份力。这个仪器有四个以不同角度向外伸展的麦克风，因此得名美杜莎（Medusa）。支撑麦克风的转子拴在一个像美式吐司一样大的金属盒子上，盒子里装着改良款的树莓派，一个廉价电脑。树莓派原本是供学校以及发展中国家使用的，然而它如此强大，以至于在世界范围内它都在被用来各种改装使用，应用范围极广（你可以在亚马逊上花不到40美金买一个）。中间麦克风的支持杆里嵌入了两个背对背放置的小型鱼眼照相机，每分钟都会录制360度全息影像。美杜莎是Bruitparif第一代声音检测仪Sonopodes的更新款。老一代仪器的部件昂贵，且主要进口自日本。Sonopodes其实现在也在服役，只是太大了，没法灵活移动。“日本的系统非常好用，只是每个都差不多要花3000欧元，我们没法像期望中部署那么多”，克里斯托弗告诉我，“所以我们建造了自己的系统，既小又节省成本，而且原理上也是一样的。”Bruitparif已经在巴黎大都市区安装了50个美杜莎仪器，这个夏天还会安装更多。
In a nearby room, a young woman was assembling Medusa microphones from components that were spread out on a counter. Most of the parts had been 3-D-printed, and she was doing something to some of them with what looked like a soldering iron. “In fact, it’s very simple,” Christophe said. “And, as with many things that are very simple, finding the solution was very complex.” The orientation of the microphones on a Medusa enables it to pinpoint the origins of the sounds that it monitors; the cameras preserve time-stamped images of the scene. Bruitparif can place a Medusa on a street lined with noisy bars and, later, document precisely which bar, at what time, was playing music, say, eleven decibels louder than the local code allows.
邻近的一间屋子里，一位年轻女士正在组装美杜莎的麦克风，柜台上有一些散落的零件。大多数零件都是3D打印出来的，她组装的过程就像是在把零件焊接起来一样。“安装起来其实非常简单”，克里斯托弗告诉我说，“就像很多事儿一样，问题很简单，找到解决方法却很复杂”。美杜莎上的麦克风能准确指向声音的来源，接着相机跟随着方向拍摄，并生成带有时间戳的照片。Bruitparif将美杜莎放置在酒吧一条街，接着记录下来哪个时间、哪个酒吧正在播放超过当地政府规定的，好比说十一分贝的音乐。
I said that documentation like that would be useful in New York, where the police often ignore noise complaints or respond to them days later.
我说这个记录在纽约实在是太有用了，警察经常忽略噪音投诉或者隔了很久才有反应。
“The idea of this system is not to depend on the police,” Christophe said. “That should be the last resort. We prefer a system in which people like you, like me, can put a sensor somewhere and have objective data, and then we can talk with one another and find some solution together.”
“其实这个系统本意上是不依靠警察来处理的”，克里斯托弗说，“找警察来处理噪音其实应该是我们最后的手段了。我们希望创造一个系统，像咱们一样的人能把这个检测仪放在什么地方以记录客观数据，接着我们能和其他人谈谈，一起想出解决方案来”。
Ah, mais oui. (But the data would probably also stand up in court.)
啊哈，但是。。（但是这些数据也很有可能在法庭上站得住脚。）
A few weeks later, back in the States, I visited the headquarters of a smaller but similar noise-monitoring project, at N.Y.U.’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, on Jay Street, in Brooklyn. That project is called Sounds of New York City (SONYC) and is funded mainly by the National Science Foundation. SONYC’s purpose, Mark Cartwright, one of the scientists on the project, told me, is “to monitor, analyze, and mitigate noise pollution.” Each sensor in its network has just one microphone, which is roughly eight inches long and covered in foam. The microphone is attached to a small, weatherproof aluminum box, which also contains a Raspberry Pi. Sometimes the sensors are mounted with a long strip of plastic spikes, which are meant to deter pigeons from using the devices as latrines, and which, on monitors installed near Washington Square Park, have developed the unanticipated additional function of accumulating tangled masses of the wind-borne hair of N.Y.U. students.
过了几周我回到美国，拜访了纽约大学城市科学与进步中心的噪音监控项目总部，它位于布鲁克林杰伊街。这个项目与上文中法国的类似，只是规模上略小。项目名为“纽约市之声（Sounds of New York City (SONYC)）”，主要由美国国家科学基金会赞助。马克·卡特莱特（Mark Cartwright）是这个项目的科学家之一，他告诉我说，纽约市之声的主要目标是“监测，分析，并缓解噪音污染”。他们也有自己的探测器网络，每个网络中的探测器有一个大约8英尺长、用泡沫包裹住的麦克风，连接着一个不受天气影响的小型铝制盒子，盒子里也装着树莓派。这些探测器有时候也用长长的塑料刺状物包裹着，这样可以防止仪器被鸽子们当洗手间使用。另外，有些安装在华盛顿广场公园的检测器还发挥了大家没想到的作用——收集了大量缠绕着的、被风吹起来的纽约大学学生们的头发。
The method that SONYC uses to collect data and to document noise-code violations is different from the one used by Bruitparif. The SONYC researchers are developing algorithms that they hope will eventually be able to identify a full range of noise sources by themselves—an example of so-called machine listening. “Having a network of sensors deployed around the city enables us to start understanding the patterns of noise and how they develop around things like construction sites,” Charlie Mydlarz, another scientist on the project, told me. He said that SONYC also gives the city’s Department of Environmental Protection actionable evidence of violations. Mydlarz and his colleagues are still training their algorithm, with help from “citizen scientists,” who visit a Web page and annotate ten-second audio files, collected by the sensors, with what they think are the sounds’ likeliest sources: jackhammer, car alarm, chainsaw, engine of uncertain size. He demonstrated the algorithm’s current iteration by alternately operating a Black & Decker electric drill and the siren of a toy fire truck near a sensor on the table in front of him. The algorithm successfully identified each and measured its decibel level. (It can also identify the fire truck’s horn.)
纽约市之声用来收集数据以及记录违反噪音管制条令的方式与Bruitparif不同。纽约市之声的研究者们正在研究一种最终能在全范围自行探测出噪声源的算法——这也是机器学习应用的一个范例。另外一位负责该项目的科学家查理·麦德拉兹（Charlie Mydlarz）告诉我，“在全市范围内部署探测仪网络能让我们了解到噪音的模式是怎么样的，以及这个模式在建筑工地附近呈现的态势”。他说，纽约市之声已经能为纽约市环境保护机构提供可供定案的证据。麦德拉兹和他的同事们仍然在训练这个算法，他们也获得了“公民科学家”们的帮助，热心民众们访问这个项目网站并协助科学家们将探测器收集到十秒长的声音文件加上注解。他们通过辨别声音类型来帮助项目将噪音分类：电钻、车辆报警器、电锯以及某种未知大小的机器引擎声等等。麦德拉兹为了向我展示项目的算法迭代成果，在检测器旁分别打开了一个百德钻孔机和一个玩具卡车的警铃。结果算法成功的分辨出了两种声音的名称，并测量了声音的分贝等级。（它同样能分辨消防车的喇叭声。）
I was accompanied to the SONYC lab by Charles Komanoff, an economist who created models that the city’s congestion-pricing plan is based on. In the course of the past five decades, he’s worked on just about every environmental issue, including noise. “In the mid-nineties, I spoke fairly regularly to small but spirited anti-car gatherings,” he told me. “I would ask for a show of hands: ‘If you could eliminate all motor-vehicle noise or all motor-vehicle air pollution—but not both—which would you choose?’ As a rule, the majority chose noise.” I had asked him to join me mainly because he owns a professional sound-level meter.
查尔斯·克曼诺夫（Charles Komanoff）陪我参观了纽约市之声的实验室。查尔斯·克曼诺夫一名经济学家，构造了一些被纽约市政府用来计算交通堵塞费用的模型。在过去的五十年时间里，他一直在研究差不多每一个环境问题，包括噪音。“九十年代中期的时候，我经常给一小群富有激情的反对车辆的人群演讲”，他告诉我，“我会让他们举手表决：‘如果你们能解决所有的汽车噪声问题或者汽车污染，但是只能解决一个问题，你们会选哪一个？’一般来说，大多数人都会选择解决汽车噪声”。其实我叫他过来主要是他有一块专业的声级计。
Komanoff and I travelled to and from Brooklyn by bicycle, and halfway across the Manhattan Bridge we stopped to take sound readings. His meter showed that, at the spot where we were standing, the average ambient-sound level, arising mostly from motor traffic on the bridge, was about seventy decibels, or roughly what you’d experience while using a vacuum cleaner at home. Then a train went over the bridge, on tracks twenty or thirty feet from where we were standing, and the reading jumped to ninety-five decibels—more than a three-hundredfold increase in sound intensity and a five- to sixfold increase in perceived loudness—or roughly what you’d hear while using a gasoline-powered lawnmower in your yard. The train sound wasn’t physically painful, but almost; even shouted conversation became impossible.
克曼诺夫和我蹬着自行车往返布鲁克林，在半路上我们停在曼哈顿桥上来测量声级计读数，上面显示就在我们站的这个地方，平均环境音量达到了70分贝。这些声音主要来自于桥上的过往汽车交通声，差不多和在家用吸尘器的声音一样大了。过了一会儿一辆列车经过大桥，离我们站的路差不多20-30尺吧，接下来平均环境音量蹿到了95分贝——这差不多是300倍音强，5-6倍的体感响度——或者就像你家后院里汽油式除草机工作的声音。列车声听起来并不刺耳和痛苦，但是在这种环境下两人大声吼叫着来谈话互相也听不见。
In the United States, sound exposure in the workplace has been regulated by the federal government since the nineteen-seventies. But the rules don’t cover all industries, and they’re applied inconsistently. The government has acknowledged that, even when compliance is absolute, the limits aren’t low enough to protect all workers from hearing loss. The regulations of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, for example, allow workers to be exposed to ninety-five decibels for four hours a day, five days a week, for an entire forty-year career. That’s always been crazy, but in the past decade it’s begun to seem even crazier, because recent research into what’s known as hidden hearing loss—which involves a previously undetected permanent reduction in neural response—has suggested that catastrophic losses could occur at sound levels that are much lower than had been thought, and after much shorter periods of exposure.
在美国，工作场所的声音暴露量从19世纪起就受联邦政府的监管。但是这些规则并不适用于所有行业，规则也有的时候也流于形式。政府自己也承认，即使合规审查到位，声音暴露量的限制也达不到保护所有员工远离听觉损失的程度。比如，美国职业安全与健康管理局法允许员工在四十年工作时长中，每周五个工作日内，每天暴露在95分贝的工作环境里四个小时。这简直是疯了，然而过去的十年情况却变得越来越疯狂。最近一项关于隐性听觉障碍——与永久性神经反应损伤有关——的调查表明，灾难性的听觉损伤很有可能发生在比我们预期中低得多的声音水平、短得多的暴露时间里。
By the mid-nineties, some scientists had begun to believe that traffic noise must be harmful to creatures other than humans, but they didn’t know how to measure its effects in isolation from those of roadway construction, vehicle emissions, highway salting, and all the other direct and indirect ecosystem insults that arise from our dependency on cars and trucks.
九十年代中期，一些科学家开始认为交通噪音不仅对人类有害，还对其他生物有负面影响。然而他们无法隔离测量铁路建设、汽车尾气、高速公路盐污染以及其他一些人类依赖汽车及卡车导致的，直接或间接的对生态环境的冒犯。
In 2012, Jesse Barber, a professor at Boise State University, in Idaho, thought of a way. He and a group of researchers built a half-kilometre-long “phantom road” in a wilderness area where no real road had ever existed. They mounted fifteen pairs of bullhorn-like loudspeakers on the trunks of Douglas-fir trees, and, during bird migration in autumn, played recordings of traffic that Barber had made on Going-to-the-Sun Road, in Glacier National Park. Chris McClure, who worked on the project, told me, “We cut up garden hoses to run the wires through, so that mice wouldn’t chew on them, and we duct-taped pieces of shower curtains over the loudspeakers, to keep off the rain.” The recorded sound wasn’t deafening, by any measure; to a New Yorker, in fact, it might have seemed almost soothing. But its effect on migrating birds was both immediate and dramatic. During periods when the speakers were switched on, the number of birds declined, on average, by twenty-eight per cent, and several species fled the area entirely. Some of the biggest impacts were on species that stayed. Heidi Ware Carlisle, who earned her master’s degree for work that she did on the project, told me, “If you just counted MacGillivray’s warblers, for example, you might say, ‘Oh, they’re not bothered by noise.’ But when we weighed them we found that they were no longer getting fatter—as they should have been, because fat fuels their migration.”
2012年，美国爱达荷树城州立大学的教授杰西·巴伯（Jesse Barber）提出了一个解决方案。他和一群研究员在荒郊野外建了一条半公里长的“幽灵路”，这个地方从来没有真正的路过。接下来，他们在周围黄杉树的树墩上安装了15对扩音大喇叭，在鸟类迁徙的秋天，播放他的车在冰川国家公园知名公路——奔向太阳之路奔驰所记录下来的交通录音。克里斯·麦可鲁尔（Chris McClure）也是项目研究者之一，他告诉我说，他们为了做实验，“切断了花园的水管来穿电线，这样老鼠就不会咬他们了。我们还用橡胶条把浴帘布碎片包到扩音器上，防止扩音器被雨淋湿。”其实录音的内容一点也谈不上震耳欲聋，对于纽约人来说听起来可能还有颇为舒心。然而这些声音对迁徙的鸟类带来的后果既直接又显著。喇叭开着的这段时间里，鸟类数量平均减少了28%；还有几种鸟完全飞离了这个区域。有些巨大的影响体现在留在这个区域的鸟类身上。海蒂·瓦雷·卡莱尔（Heidi Ware Carlisle）在这个项目上的付出为她赢得了硕士学位。她告诉我，“打个比方，如果你数数灰头地莺的数量，你会说‘噢，他们也没受噪音的影响嘛”’。然而当我们给他们称体重的时候发现，他们并没有变重。他们应该得变重让脂肪提供足够的能量帮助他们渡过迁徙季。”
A dozen years before the phantom-road experiment, a group of American researchers accidentally performed a similar study underwater. They had been measuring concentrations of stress-related hormone metabolites in the feces of right whales in the Bay of Fundy. (They were assisted by dogs trained to detect the scent of whale turds from the side of a boat.) In mid-September, 2001, the metabolite concentrations fell; when they were measured again the following season, they had gone back up. The scientists had been using hydrophones to monitor underwater sound levels in the bay, and they realized that the drop in stress had coincided exactly with an equally sudden decline in human-generated underwater noise. The cause was the temporary pause in ocean shipping which followed 9/11.
幽灵路实验的十二年前，一群美国研究员无意间在水下做了一个类似的实验。他们一直在加拿大芬迪湾研究露脊鲸粪便中与压力相关的激素代谢物的浓度。（他们在受训犬只的帮助下在船的两侧寻找鲸鱼粪便的气味。）在2001年的9月中旬，他们发现代谢物浓度下降了；同年冬天他们再次测量之后发现，这个压力值又回来了。科学家们在芬迪湾用水听器监测水底声音强度之后发现，鲸鱼压力值下降的同期，人类在水下产生的噪声也突然降低了。这是因为911事件之后，海洋运输暂时停止了的缘故。
I learned about the Bay of Fundy project from Peter Tyack, an American behavioral ecologist, who, for the past seven years, has been a member of the faculty at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland. He also does research at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, on Cape Cod, where he used to work full time—and that’s where we met. We sat in a lab on the second floor of W.H.O.I.’s Marine Research Facility, and he explained that sound can harm marine creatures both directly, by physically injuring them, and indirectly, by interfering with their feeding, their mating, and their communication. “We’re visual creatures, but sea animals don’t need to be,” he said. “Underwater, you can see maybe ten metres, but you can hear things a thousand kilometres away.” The loudest human sounds in the oceans are made by seismic air guns, which are used to search for undersea deposits of oil and natural gas. (They’re so loud that acoustic monitors on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge pick them up from hundreds, and even thousands, of miles away.) “In terms of the total sound energy that humans put into the ocean, though, shipping is by far the biggest source,” he said.Tyack gave me a tour of the research facility downstairs. We passed a bank of freezers, a room with a CT scanner, and a band saw big enough to carve a small whale into chunks, and then entered a room that was furnished with supersized versions of the kind of stainless-steel tables you’d find in the autopsy room of a morgue. “There’s a big door over there, so that a truck can back right up,” he said. “And those gantries up on the ceiling move the animals onto the tables.”
我是从美国行为生态学家皮特·泰雅克（Peter Tyack）那儿知道芬迪湾的项目的。他在过去的七年里一直担任苏格兰圣安德鲁斯大学的教师，同时也在位于美国鳕鱼角的伍兹霍尔研究所从事研究工作，我们就是在这儿见面的。我们俩坐在研究所二层的海洋实验室里，他跟我解释声音是如何直接地、生理上损害海洋生物的同时又间接地影响到他们的摄食、交配以及沟通的。“我们是视觉生物，但是海洋动物可不需要视觉”，他说，“在水底，你可能能看到10米的距离，但是能听到1000公里外的动静。”海洋里最吵的人造声是由海洋地震气枪发出的，这个主要用来探寻海底石油及天然气储量。（这个声音大到上百英里、甚至是上千英里外的大西洋中脊声波探测器都能捕捉到。）“然而，至今为止，人类在海洋里投放的最大声能却来源于航运。”他说。泰雅克带我去楼下的实验室里逛了一圈。我们经过了一排排冰柜，一个放着CT机的房间，以及一个大到足以把小鲸鱼切成块儿的带锯。接着我们走进一个由一些超大型停尸房解剖间里的那种不锈钢大桌子装潢的房间。“在这儿后面有个大门，卡车能在后面直接停下来”，他解释说，“之后屋顶的龙门架就能把动物们直接挪到桌子上。”
One of Tyack’s ongoing research interests is the impact of sonar on marine mammals. He and his colleagues have developed a sound-and-movement monitor—“sort of a waterproof iPhone”—which they can affix, with suction cups, to whales’ backs. They have discovered, among other things, that some species are more sensitive to sonar than anyone had previously suspected. “If they hear sonar, they’ll stop foraging, leave the area, and not come back for several days,” he said. Sometimes frightened whales bolt toward the surface and die of decompression sickness—the bends—or of an arterial gas embolism. He continued, “We are now quite sure that what happens is that the whales are a kilometre deep, and they’re foraging in the dark for food, and the sound of sonar from a naval exercise triggers a panic reaction.”
泰雅克现阶段的一个研究兴趣在声纳对海洋动物的影响。他和同事们开发了一个声音-动态检测仪，按T泰雅克的话说，有点像个防水的iPhone。他们能将这个仪器用吸盘吸附在鲸鱼的背上。他们在众多结果中发现，有些鲸鱼种类对声纳的敏感程度超出之前研究者的预料。“他们听到声纳后会停止觅食，离开这片区域，在接下来的几天时间内也不会回来，”，泰雅克说。有的时候受惊的鲸鱼会冲上海面，并死于潜水夫病这样的减压症或动脉空气栓塞。泰雅克继续向我解释，“有关与鲸鱼的遭遇，我们现在非常明白的是，他们当时在水下1km深度的黑暗水域里觅食，海洋实验所发出的声纳声导致了他们恐慌症发作。“
Tyack said that it’s long been known that human-created sound can also interfere with mating calls, thereby reducing the reproductive success of many species, including ones that have already been hunted virtually to nonexistence. Consequent reductions in those species’ numbers can be invisible even to marine biologists, since the failure to reproduce doesn’t result in carcasses on beaches. “Even now, our estimates of the population size of marine mammals are plus or minus fifty per cent,” he said. “So, basically, the population would have to be on its way toward extinction before we’d notice. And by then it would be too late.”
泰雅克说，人们很早就知道人造声会干扰海洋生物的求偶鸣叫，因此减少了许多海洋生物的繁殖成功率，其中包括一些被追猎得濒临灭绝的种类。这些生物大量减少的情况对于甚至是海洋生物学者来说都是无法观测的，因为他们繁殖不成功并不会导致海滩上出现神秘海洋生物尸体。“直到现在，我们对海洋生物群体大小的估计值浮动区间是正负50%”，他说，“所以基本上来说，等我们能发现异常情况的时候这种生物都快灭绝了。到这个时候就实在太晚了。”
On the day that Charles Komanoff and I took those sound readings on the Manhattan Bridge, I also visited Arline Bronzaft, a retired professor of environmental psychology, at her apartment, on East Seventy-ninth Street, near the river. In 1975, she and a co-author published an influential research paper that, like the phantom-road and whale-poop studies, hinged on an accidental discovery. “One of my students, at Lehman College, told me that her child attended an elementary school next to an elevated train line, and that the classroom was so loud that the students were unable to learn,” she said. The school was P.S. 98, in Inwood, near the northern tip of Manhattan, and the track was two hundred and twenty feet from the building. Bronzaft’s student said that she and some other parents were planning to sue, but Bronzaft, whose husband was a lawyer, told her that, in order to be successful, they would need to prove that their children had been harmed. Bronzaft offered to help and found that, in classrooms on the side of the building facing the tracks, passing trains raised decibel readings to rock-concert levels for roughly thirty seconds every four and a half minutes, and that, during those periods, teachers had to either stop teaching or shout; then, once a train had passed, they had to regain their students’ attention.
Bronzaft obtained three years’ worth of reading-test scores from the school’s principal—“I must say, he was an activist principal,” she said—and was able to demonstrate to the city that the sixth graders on the track side of the building had fallen about eleven months behind those on the quieter side.
我和查尔斯·克曼诺夫骑车去曼哈顿桥测声音读数的那天，还去拜访了艾琳·彭萨福特（Arline Bronzaft），一位退休的环境心理学教授，她家住在哈德逊河附近的东79街。1975年她和人联合发表了一篇颇具影响力的论文。这个研究和“幽灵路”以及“鲸鱼便”一样，实验也是在不经意中完成的。“一位我曾在纽约州立大学莱曼学院（Lehman College）教过的学生告诉我说，她的孩子在铁路旁的一所小学读书。每天教室噪音太大了，学生们根本没法读书。”艾琳·彭萨福特告诉我说。这个学校叫P.S. 98，，就在北曼哈顿顶端的英伍德。列车轨道离学校教学楼差不多220英尺远。彭萨福特的学生说她和其他一些学生家长本来打算起诉，但是她的丈夫，一名律师告诉她，要想赢官司，他们得证明孩子们的确受到了伤害。彭萨福特站了出来。她发现，教室里面对轨道的那一侧，来往的列车每四分半钟能将分贝读数提高到摇滚音乐会的等级。在此期间，老师们要么暂停课堂要么只能大吼大叫地继续上课。等列车经过之后，老师只能重新花时间让学生们集中精力上课。彭萨福特从校长那儿拿到了差不多学生们三年的阅读课成绩——“我必须得说，校长他的确是一名行动派”，她说。总之她能证明教学楼里靠近轨道的六年级学生成绩比教学楼安静部分学生的课堂进度少了11个月。
Bronzaft stayed involved. She helped persuade the city to cover the classroom ceilings with sound-deadening acoustic tiles, and the M.T.A. to install rubber pads between the rails and the ties on tracks near the school (and, eventually, throughout the subway system). In a follow-up study, published in 1981, she was able to show that those measures had been effective and that the gap in test scores between students on the exposed and less exposed sides of the building had disappeared.
彭萨福特并没有停止脚步。接下来她敦促市里将教室内装上了消音瓷砖，并且让纽约大都会运输署在学校附近的列车轨道和轨枕上装上了橡胶垫（最终整个铁路系统都用上了这一招）。她的下一项研究结果于1981年发表，证明了以上这些消音措施都卓有成效，暴露在列车噪音学生们与那些身处教学楼较安静部分学生的进度差距已经消失了。
Those experiences increased Bronzaft’s impatience with scientists and politicians who hesitate to act on persuasive but incomplete data. She asked me if I knew who had been the President of the United States at the time of the passage of the federal Noise Control Act and of the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. And I did know: Richard Nixon. She took me into her office, a book-filled study that she calls the Noise Room, and, on a couch, opened an accordion folder that contained a dozen or so U.S.-government pamphlets, most of them from the seventies. One described noise impacts identical to the ones that researchers all over the world still study today, including hearing loss, cardiovascular disease, interrupted sleep, and delayed reading and language development.
彭萨福特的种种经历增进了她对那些拿着她不太完整却极有说服力的数据，却迟疑不前、不采取措施的政客以及科学家的不耐烦感。她问我知不知道是谁通过了美国联邦噪音控制法、成立了国家环境保护局、职业安全与健康管理局与国家职业安全卫生研究所。我的确知道是谁：理查德尼克松（Richard Nixon）。她领着我走进他的办公室，她自己称为噪音室，一间堆满了书的书房。房间里放着一个沙发，上面摆着着一个打开的文件资料包，里面装了差不多一打70年代美国政府印刷的小册子。其中一本册子关于噪音影响的描述与今天世界范围内研究者的结论一样：噪音将造成包括听觉损伤、心脑血管疾病、睡眠失调、阅读以及语言障碍在内的一系列问题。
It concluded with a quotation from William H. Stewart, who served as the Surgeon General under both Lyndon B. Johnson and Nixon. In his keynote address at the 1968 Conference on Noise as a Public Health Hazard, in Washington, Stewart said, “Must we wait until we prove every link in the chain of causation?” and added, “In protecting health, absolute proof comes late. To wait for it is to invite disaster or to prolong suffering unnecessarily.”
最终这个小册子以曾经担任过林登·B·约翰逊（Lyndon B. Johnson）和尼克松（Nixon）的医务总监威廉·H·斯图尔特（William H. Stewart）的一句话作为结尾。1968年他曾在一个主题为“噪音——公共健康危害“的大会上做主旨演讲，他说，“我们一定要等到能证明每一条因果关系链都合理的那一天吗？”以及“在健康防护领域，要等到获得事实证据的那一天就太晚了。等待意味着我们邀请灾难进家门或者毫无理由的延长人们忍受痛苦的时间。”
That was half a century ago. Scientists still don’t know everything there is to know about the effects of sound on living things, but they know a lot, and for a long time they’ve also known how to make the world substantially less noisy. Peter Tyack told me that reducing the sound impact of global shipping would be possible, since “the navies of the world have spent billions of dollars learning how to make ships quiet.” One method, he said, is to physically isolate engines from metal hulls; another is to shape propellers in ways that make them less likely to produce shock waves in the water. Subway cars everywhere could roll on rubber tires, as some of the ones I rode in Paris do. Highway speed limits could be enforced; so could laws requiring the use of E.P.A.-approved exhaust systems on all motorcycles. Maximum earbud volumes could be limited to indisputably safe levels. Directional sirens could significantly reduce or eliminate noise for people who are not in the path of an emergency vehicle. Measuring noise is important, Bronzaft said, but it isn’t an end in itself. “If I don’t see the data being used to get action, I’m not going to be happy,” she continued. “We had all this stuff in the nineteen-seventies. And what have we done?”
这都已经是半个世纪之前的事了。科学家们现在仍然不能说明白声音对生物的每一种影响到底有什么，但是他们非常清楚并且长久以来了熟于心的是，如何才能让这个世界安静下来。皮特·泰雅克告诉我说，现在减少国际航运所造成的声音影响是有可能的，因为“海洋国家们为了让船只更加安静已经花费了几十亿美元。”他说，其中有一种方法是从物理结构上入手的，那就是将引擎与金属船体分离开来。另外一种是重塑螺旋桨的外观，这样能减少船只在水中产生震波的可能性；四处可见的地铁列车可以像我当时在巴黎搭乘的地铁那样，换上橡胶轮胎；高速公路速度应该被限制；法律还可以从美国环保局排气检测入手，对每一辆机动车进行检测；入耳式耳塞的最大音量应该被设计在无可争辩的安全级别以下；声音方向可控的警报器也能大大减少或者消除不在紧急车辆道路上人们所接收的噪音。噪音检测很重要，彭萨福特补充说，但是不应该检测完就没下文了。“我要是看不到这些数据被好好利用起来，我可不会开心的。”她接着说，“我们在70年代就有这些噪音检测的玩意儿了。我们这些年采取什么措施了吗？”