The book was written by an Italian author Piergiorgio Odifreddi, who is an Italian mathematician, logician, a lover of science and a popular science writer. It was originally written in the Itanlian language. I search the book on the internet and found no English edition. There is only the Chinese translation. The title of the book could be the dictionary of the stupid or of human stupidity.
As is said in the Chinese introduction, this is an encyclopedia of interesting phenomenon of human life, ranging from everyday life to religion, politics, entertainment,history, literature, science, economics and so on. The author tries to intrepretates all theses popular concepts in human society and wants to exposes their deceptiveness.
Since the author calls his book a dictionary, we can see it is edited in the form of a dictionary. It has totally 263 terms/items which are arranged alphabetically from A to Z, we can see the index at the back of the book. As you can see, it covers a very broad range of topics;
There are too many entries to share, so I just pick 2-3 terms which i think is interesting to share.
the first one is "Sanita" 医疗，in English "health care" or medical treatment. The author asks which one is more stupid: those who refuse to vaccinate their children or those who believe they are sick and take heavy dose of medicine? We know in English we have pharmacy/pharmaceutics which are related to medical cares. Their etymological root is Greek word "pharmakon" which means both medicine and poison. When we face all kinds of private and public medical agencies,people will eventually doubt the need of endless seeing the doctor, doing medical examination, taking pills and treatment, doing the surgery and so on. Doctors' attention have been turned from patients to disease itself, which means doctors are ,more concerned with medical technology and economics at the cost of humanity and humanitarian care. He quotes a Nobel prize winner's experiment data, says that the more a country spend on health care, the more its people worried about their health conditions. Actually people are healthier than they think.
Western health care system does not only produces new medicine but also gives birth to new diseases. In UsA, health care expenditure accounts for 15% of the country's GDP. And only 20% of today's medicine is useful in medical treatment, the remaining 80% are useless or even harmful. Data tells us what medicine is for: to cure people or to make money for big medicine companies.
2 w bush
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