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可能因为昨天下午打了个盹，晚上有点睡不着，一直磨蹭到快十点中才睡。凌晨四点多钟醒，感觉还挺困的。起来进书房稍微弹下琴就五点了，出去跑个步，完了休息会儿冲个澡开始做英式松饼。感觉还挺香的，不过老头子似乎不喜欢甜的煎饼。改进空间还挺多，比如只有中筋面粉，所以口感还有点嚼劲，不是很松软；打蛋的时候有点蛋黄漏到蛋清里了；稍微煎糊了点。滚回床上听听lecture，然后进书房练练口语啥的。瞅一眼第五话，然后刷刷题就到中午了。午饭后打两个活动任务，然后进书房弹琴练口语。这一章历史研究巨长，差不多五十页（列了21个文明那一章24页的样子），刚好分五节，那就化整为零每天写一节呗。看得打瞌睡。五点了有时间跳个舞，但是懒得动，虽然电扇已经搬进来了。骑行的训练计划最后一周没有long ride，这怎么行？周末还有个四十公里的徽章，这个还是可以拿的。于是取消计划，重新从第一周开始。最后记个流水账，摸下鱼，等下吃完晚饭睡觉了。

Let's try to push our arugment one step further: the greater the difficulty, the greater the stimulus to civilizations. The first example is from China. The Yangtse River is more navigable and its floods are less frequent than those of the Yellow River. But the Sinic Civilization emerged near the latter. Boeotia and Attica were both countries of the Hellenic Civilization. Their cultural contrast, illustrated in the phrases 'Boeotian swine' and 'Attic salt', was geographically coincident with an equally striking contrast in physical environment. Byzantium and Calchedon sit on different side of the Bosphorus Strait. Calchedon was planted first and developed as an ordinary agricultural colony, while Byzantium was found seventeen years later, failed to become an agricultural community, and suffered from Thracian barbarians. But Byzantium developed their commercial possibilities and became a much more important city in history. The Syriac Civilization has three great feats: the invention of the Alphabet, the discovery of the Atlantic, and the creation of the monotheism. We don't know the inventor of the Alphabet, but the discovery of the Atlantic should be attributed to the Phoenicians, who lived in much worse places than the Philistines, another main population of the Syriac Civilization, whose was similar to the Boeotians in Greek. But the most important feat, the spiritual discovery of the monotheism, was made by the Israelites, who lived in hill-country of Ephraim and Judah, which were even less inviting than the Phoenician coast. When it comes to the struggle of North America(including independence war and civil war), our proposition stands: the winners were the New Englanders, who lived in an unusual difficult environment compared to their competitors, including the Dutch, the Franch, the Spaniards and other English colonists settledalong the Atlantic seaboard in and around Virginia.

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