Private identity is related to a person’s identity where he cannot describe his feeling publicly and has difficulties in expressing his ideas and thoughts or socializing with others. It is like being introverted (内向的) in front of the public. And public identity is related to somewhat expressing one’s feeling perfectly in front of the public. There are many factors for a person to be publicly introverted, which includes different languages and cultures.

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez written by Richard Rodriguez reflects his development from a disadvantaged son of Mexican immigrants living in northern California into a well-educated person. Rodriguez strongly believes that for accessing the privileges of public life, people must learn how to be assimilated into public society and depress their private identity. He argues that developing a public identity is directly related to maturing into adulthood.

Rodriguez states how he started his school life, from knowing only 50 words to becoming a publicly recognized professor and author. He argues that everyone deserves to speak in a public voice and feel belonging in a public society. But to gain this, one should make sacrifices to the expectations of society. This includes loss of private identity, because when a person starts spending more time acting and speaking in public, he starts to live a life with reduced intimacy (亲密).

Rodriguez accepts these facts because he remembers the feeling of closeness to his family as a child and how it started fading when he started living a public life. Rodriguez also argues that the school should be a place to build a child’s public identity rather than developing his private identity he has formed at home. He believes that one of the purposes of education is to develop children’s ability to speak in a public language, which is a crucial step in their development.

Before I studied psychology, I used to think that people would laugh when funny things occurred. While I was right about that, I discovered there are lots of other psychological factors that make people laugh other than the funny part of a joke. When someone laughs at a joke, there will usually be more than one reason that makes him laugh and the more reasons there are, the more powerful the joke will be.

I was attending a stand-up comedy show in Egypt, and when the man started to make fun of pedestrians crossing streets, everyone laughed their hearts out. The main reason those people strongly laughed was that almost all of them felt angry towards pedestrians who crossed streets carelessly. The joke wasn’t only funny, it also made the audience feel that they were right about being angry at those pedestrians. That is, people were laughing both because of the funny joke and because of the happiness experienced as a result of the psychological support they got.

The better a joke makes a person feel, and the more it includes other psychological factors, the more the person will like it. For example, if you envy one of your friends, and someone tells a joke that is funny and, at the same time, makes your friend seem stupid, then you will probably laugh at it louder than if you weren’t jealous of him.

In short, we don’t laugh only when we hear something funny; we also laugh when we experience some kind of happiness that results from the other psychological factors involved in the joke. I strongly discourage making fun of anyone or belittling someone to make someone else laugh. All I want to explain is that if your joke supports a person’s emotions, he will certainly like it a lot.

Vitamin C for a cold? A good dose of Vitamin D on a sunny day? We all know that vitamins are critical for our health, but how did they get their names and when were they discovered in the first place?

American nutrition scientist Elmer McCullum conducted a variety of feed experiments with different animal populations and discovered that an “accessory” substance contained in some fats was essential to growth. That fat-soluble (脂溶的) substance became known as Vitamin “A” for “accessory.”

McCollum and others also conducted further experiments with rice-bran-derived nutrient, naming it Vitamin “B” after beriberi, which can cause heart failure and a loss of sensation in the legs and feet. Eventually, it turned out that the substance known as Vitamin B was a complex of eight water-soluble vitamins, which were each given individual names and numbered in order of discovery.

The custom of naming vitamins alphabetically in order of discovery continued. Today, four fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K) and nine water-soluble vitamins (Vitamin C and the eight B vitamins) are considered essential to human growth and health. Only one vitamin bucked the oh-so-logical naming system: Vitamin K, discovered by Danish researcher Carl Peter Henrik Dam in 1929. The substance should have been in line to be called Vitamin F given its discovery date. But Dam’s research revealed that the vitamin is essential for blood coagulation (凝固) — known as Koagulation in the German journal that published his research — and his abbreviation for the vitamin somehow stuck.

It’s been decades since the last essential vitamin — Vitamin B12 — was discovered in 1948. It now appears unlikely that scientists will ever discover a new essential vitamin. But even if there’s no Vitamin F or G in our future, that doesn’t mean nutritional discovery has stopped completely. If the golden age of vitamin discovery was an appetizer (开胃菜) of sorts, scientists are devoted to the main course — a rapidly evolving understanding of the ways food shapes our lives, one microscopic substance at a time.