生活記事

He stopped traffic on Fifth Avenue like the Beatles or Mrilyn Monroe. He could’ve been president of Israel or played violin at Carnegie Hall, but was too busy thinking. His musings on God, love and the meaning of life grace our greeting cards and day-timers.

Fifty years after his death, his shock of white hair and droopy mustache still symbolize genius.

Einstein remains the foremost scientist of the modern ear. Looking back 2400 years, only Newton, Galileo and Aristotle were his equals.

Around the world, universities and academies are celebrating the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s “miracle year” when he published five scientific papers in 1905 that fundamentally changed our grasp of space, time, light and matter. Only he could top himself about a decade later with his theory of general relativity.

Born in the are of horse-drawn carriages, his ideas launched a dazzling technological revolution that has generated more changes in a century that in the previous two millennia.

Computers, satellites, telecommunication, lasers, television and nuclear power all owe their invention to ways in which Einstein peeled back the veneer of the observable world to expose a stranger and more complicated reality underneath.

Yet there is more, and it is why Einstein transcends mere genius and has become our culture’s grandfatherly icon.

Yet there is more, and it is why Einstein transcends mere genius and has become our culture’s grandfatherly icon.

He escaped Hitler’s Germany and devoted the rest of his life to humanitarian and pacifist causes with an authority unmatched by any scientist today, or even most politicians and religious leaders. He used his celebrity to speak out against fascism, racial prejudice and the McCarthy hearings. His FBI file ran 1400 pages.

His letters reveal a tumultuous personal life—married twice and indifferent toward his children while obsessed with physics. Yet he charmed lovers and admirers with poetry and sailboat outings. Friends and neighbors fiercely protected his privacy.

In the original idea of speed dating, men and women are rotated to meet each other for only eight minutes each, are forced to the next round no matter how much they are enjoying the interaction (or dread the next one), then submit to the organizers a list of who they would like to see again (a form of approval voting since any number of suitors can be approved). If there is a match, phone numbers are forwarded. They cannot be traded during the initial eight-minute meeting, to reduce pressure especially on women) to accept or reject a suitor to their face.

Speed dating is a formalized matchmaking process or dating system (a variant of a meeting system where the purpose is to enjoy romantic or friendship dates rather than decide anything). It originated in Jewish circles in the United States as a way to ensure that more Jewish singles met each other in large cities where they were outnumbered by non-Jews. It has been made more popular by its use on dating game shows, e.g. Fifth Wheel, and has recently become popular in the gay community. Supporters argue that speed dating simply saves time, as most people decide if they are romantically compatible very quickly, and first impressions are usually permanent.

Critics of speed dating say it’s shallow and tends to reinforce first impressions, which are often shallow to begin with. A scientific view of speed dating is that eight minutes is more than sufficient to determine if the range of a mate’s hormones, a key indicator of immunities, is complementary (different) from one’s own. This is claimed by some researchers to be the key factor in the so-called “first impression”, and since it is olfactory (smell-based), there is no need for two individuals considering child-raising to spend more time on first impressions, it being more important to “sniff out” other mates.

This view is often rejected by critics as reducing humans to dog-like status, sniffing each other and then running off to sniff others. Another objection is that dating has more purposes than the raising of children, and that the invention of speed dating by a religious minority intent on resisting assimilation (and thus resisting cross-breeding) is a cynical move to increase their own population relative to the majority.

None of these views seem to contradict each other, and speed dating grows in popularity perhaps due to the very objections that have been raised to it.