The National Gallery
Description:
The National Gallery is the British national art museum built on the north side of Trafalgar Square in London. It houses a diverse collection of more than 2, 300 examples of European art ranging from the 13th-century religious paintings to more modern ones by Renoir and Van Gogh. The older collections of the gallery are reached through the main entrance while the more modern works in the East Wing are most easily reached from Trafalgar Square by a ground floor entrance.
Layout（布局）：
The modern Sainsbury Wing on the western side of the building houses the 13th-to 15th-century paintings, and artists include Duccio, Uccello, Van Eyck, Lippi, Mantegna, Botticelli and Memling.
The main West Wing houses the 16th-century paintings, and artists include Leonardo da Vinci, Cranach, Michelangelo, Raphael, Bruegel, Bronzino, Titan and Veronese.
The North Wing houses the 17th-century paintings, and artists include Caravaggio, Rubens, Poussin, Van Dyck, Velazquez, Claude and Vermeer.
The East Wing houses the 18th-to early 20th-century paintings, and artists include Canaletto, Goya, Turner, Constable, Renoir and Van Gogh.
Opening Hours:
The gallery is open every day from 10 am to 6 pm （Fridays 10 am to 9 pm） and is free, but charges apply to some special exhibitions.
Getting There:
Nearest underground stations: Charing Cross （2-minute walk）, Leicester Square （3-minute walk）, Embankment （7-minute walk）, and Piccadilly Circus （8-minute walk）.
My grandfather was a rigid（刻板的）perfectionist. Everything had to be orderly, precise and punctual. I was frightened of him until the day he died. Growing up, my mother desperately wanted to please him. She probably thought he might leave if she didn't.
In fact, I now think the fear of being left alone, abandoned, was a current throughout much of her life. A few years into my father suffering from Alzheimer's, my mother's voice on the phone sounded so upset that I had to tell her, ""Just be with yourself for a little while. Be calm and everything can be better. "
"No, I can't do that. I don't want to do that," she said suddenly, closing the door on the subject. A while after my father died, she told me that she kept the television on all the time because it made her feel less lonely. "It makes the house seem to have more people living in it," she said. I had given in to my annoyance and either turned the volume down or turned it off. But after she told me that it filled in some of the loneliness, I never reached for the remote control again.
We have had a long journey together, she and I. Over a half-century of memories, now that the journey has ended, I have a choice which ones to study and which ones to turn over in my hands and dust off（抹去）.
I choose to look at the ones that ache with a sweet truth not told often enough. There was love between us. It was just hard to find sometimes. I choose to remember her face on that winter day in Manhattan, when I came to her with a broken heart. I choose to remember walking on the shore with her in summers when we rented a beach house. Somehow the sea always changed us. I choose to remember how she looked on my wedding day when she handed me a bracelet（手镯）that had belonged to my grandmother. "Something old," she said.
There's a new AI program: ChatGPT. The tool is an AI chatbot system that OpenAI released in November 2022 to show off and test what a very large, powerful AI system can achieve.
ChatGPT remembers the idea of your dialogue, using previous questions and answers to inform its next responses. It gets its answers from huge volumes of information on the Internet. ChatGPT is built on top of the OpenAI GPT-3 family of large language models and is fine-tuned （a method of transfer learning） using both supervised and reinforcement learning （监督和强化学习）.
You can ask ChatGPT anything, like explaining physics, asking for birthday party ideas and getting programming help. Perhaps it's not smart enough to replace all humans yet, but it can be creative, and its answers can sound authoritative. A few days after its launch, more than 1 million people were trying out ChatGPT. UBS analyst Lloyd Walmsley estimated in February 2023 that ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly users in January, accomplishing in 2 months what took TikTok about 9 months and Instagram two and a half years.
ChatGPT is free to use at the moment because it is still in its research stage. But when too many people hop onto the server（服务器）, it is overloaded and can't process your request. It just means you should try visiting the site at a later time when fewer people are trying to access it. If you want to skip the wait and have reliable access, there is an option for you. As of Feb. 1, 2023, OpenAI has a ChatGPT pro plan, ChatGPT Plus, which allows users to have general access even during peak times. This service does come at a cost of $20/month.
However, ChatGPT cannot replace Google. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence bot that provides solutions to your questions, but Google is a search engine in which you can search for as much information as possible. ChatGPT has limited knowledge due to its programming but Google has unlimited knowledge which is updated every day.
A diverse crowd of several hundred people queued up in front of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco on Thursday morning for a ceremony that meant more to them than just the issue of a popular postage stamp.
The United States Postal Service's launch of a special stamp for the Year of the Rabbit has come to symbolize more than just a collectors' item for many. "We constantly talk about celebrations of our diversity as strengths," San Francisco Mayor London Breed said at the stamp's launch. "The Lunar New Year represents thousands of years of history. It is the time to promote this （Asian） community in such an extraordinary way. "Breed emphasized that San Francisco is a place where discrimination（歧视）against Asians is unacceptable.
Inspired by decorated masks used in dragon and lion dances, USPS art director Antonio Alcala worked on the beautiful rabbit stamp design with artist Camille Chew.
Jay Xu, director of the Asian Art Museum, said the Lunar New Year celebrations and the stamp launch all reflect the recognition of "our community's fine integrity（正直）and essentialism" to the United States. "It enables us to tell more stories-our past, our present and our future, " said Xu, adding that people could strike up a conversation through the collection of artifacts（历史文物）such as stamps. "Stamps can go everywhere and can define friendship between different countries and cultures. This stamp is for all. The Lunar New Year is for all. "
Derek Kan, a member of the USPS board of governors, said, "For more than three decades, USPS has issued stamps highlighting the Lunar New Year, and they are some of the most successful stamp releases in our history. "
Chloe Chan, a second-generation Chinese immigrant, said the rabbit stamp is very "artistic" and worthy of her long wait in line. She has collected every stamp the USPS has issued for the Chinese New Year celebration. Chan is hopeful that her children and grandchildren will observe the Lunar New Year the same way she does, with housecleaning, holiday decorations, rituals（礼仪）and food to honor family roots and the Chinese culture.
The USPS issued its first Chinese New Year stamp for the Year of the Rooster on Dec. 30, 1992.
Book clubs help to create a reading-friendly environment and encourage people to continually develop and strengthen their reading skills. By creating a book club with your children, you are teaching your family that reading can be fun and enriching. .
Be sure to allow your children to help with the planning. A great way they can help to establish the club is to allow them to pick the name. . Additionally, getting your children involved with the early stages of the book club will make them more dedicated（献身）to the cause.. This is a great social event that will make children excited about reading. Have your kids create the invitations and help choose the theme.
Reading goals could be to read a specific number of books, a variety of different styles, or to read an entire series of books.. Encourage each member to come up with an award to present to another member （as a parent, you, of course, will create a special and specific award for each child to ensure that no one is left out）.
Establishing a club name, motto, meeting time, discussion, goals, awards and parties are just some of the many ways you can make a book club work in your family. as your kids grow and mature. What is most important with book clubs is to make sure everyone is having fun and benefiting from the chance to read.
A. Parents should often educate their children at home
B. Here's something to bear in mind while creating a book club
C. Another idea is to invite other families over once a month for a book party
D. By establishing a club name and even a club motto, you are bringing the club to life
E. When your club meets its goal, then it is time for an awards ceremony or a special celebration
F. Deepen your children's sense of meaning and wonder while they have fun with their friends
G. The club can develop a much better book discussion group to fit your children's needs and interests
When it's not your time to go, it's not your time to go. April 12th was not Kyle Semrau's day to leave this earth.
The day started as usual, with one big 1 : Kyle's 6-year-old daughter Macie refused to go to kindergarten. She only sat in the basement room.
This 2 is unusual for the kindergartner, but she was just really missing her dad that morning. It was also the one-year anniversary of her grandmother's death, so she needed some extra 3 . When Kyle got home from his night job, he agreed to spend a 4 day with his daughter and 4-year-old son, Caleb, while his wife was at work.
Kyle wasn't feeling very well when he got home that day. Later that morning, he lost consciousness repeatedly. When he was 5 , he was yelling for help.
As fate would have it, help was in the house! Macie heard her father and realized she needed to do something. While Caleb comforted their dad, she 6what happened like someone three times her age.
At one of Kyle's conscious moments, Macie 7 him to tell her the password of the cellphone so that she could 8 the phone. Then, she called the police.
Administrative assistant Judy Smith picked up the telephone at the Eliot Police Department. To her 9, Macie almost10everything, including her home address, her dad's name and age, and how police could best get to him inside the basement room where he'd been resting.
Police arrived in just two minutes and 11 sent Kyle to Wentworth-Douglass Hospital.
Kyle spent three days 12in the hospital. "If I can say anything about this 13 experience, it's for everyone to teach kids about awareness," said Kyle. "If I hadn't taught my daughter certain things she couldn't learn in school, this outcome could have been 14 different. Macie deserves to be 15.
Knowing me, knowing you
Two weeks ago my grandfather passed away. It really put me into deep sorrow because my grandfather held a unique position in my life. For me, my grandfather was not only a beloved family member a tutor（导师）who encouraged me to work hard and write well.
I'll never forget the first time I read a long piece of his writing. It was when I applied for Princeton and he offered （write） to the university on my behalf. He wrote in beautiful characters and used poetic language, unafraid of sounding too "flowery"（华丽的）. I read the letter out loud so that I could hear the rhyming sounds.
（typical）, my grandfather valued hard work. Every time he came to visit us in New York, he would praise my brothers and me for our good performance. （inspire） by him, I had more confidence in myself and always pulled my （weigh）. I knew he had worked hard to raise the big family during the Great Depression. The reason he was awarded many military medals was that he had won many battles in the Navy in World War II.
At the funeral（葬礼）, accident I met with a friend of my grandfather's. He walked to me and said that my grandfather had told him about a small book that had been written by me a few years before. After it came out, I had it sent to my grandfather but （receive） no reply. This man told me that my book hit my grandfather's heart and brought tears to his eyes. My grandfather said the book was very moving and he was so proud of me.
Now I feel is even more worthwhile to write well because I know my grandfather appreciated it. I should also learn to be （independence） later in my life. He will be remembered by me forever.
