Random knowledge

I am leaving for Cape Verde. Posting might be difficult, but I’ll try.

Cape Verde is also home to one of my favourite singers, Cesaria Evora, a morna singer.

The Origins of Cybex Space about Gustav Zander’s amazing gymnastic devices

Rawls vs. Nozick: the standoff between these two thinkers is central to political philosophy today. More on Rawls and also more on Nozick.

The Nerve of Frida Kahlo in the NYRB. Links I posted last year about Frida.

Images can be found just about everywhere on the mighty internet. Below you’ll find some interesting gateways to larger image collections. Some are for free, some ask for hard bucks. Some are copyrighted, others are not or even others have a Creative Commons license. If you have located an image somewhere in the digital chaos of the world wide web, always check the conditions of use. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

The easiest way to search images is to use search engines :

Ask image search
Google advanced image search
Yahoo image search

Next you can search Creative Commons images,

Creative Commons Web site, Creative Commons explained and portal
Creative Commons image search
Google Creative Commons search (yes try using the advanced search features of Google iso of the ususal simple search bar)
Yahoo Creative Commons search
everystockphoto.com is a search engine for creative commons photos, located in Vancouver

and free stock image collections (always nice if it’s for free, but read the fine print of some of these…) :

DeviantART
FreeFoto.com
Free Images.co.uk
Imageafter
MorgueFile (The term “morgue file” is popular in the newspaper business to describe the file that holds past issues flats)
OpenPhoto.Net
Stock.xchng

Media resources are great for finding recent images :

AFP (Agence France-Presse)
BBC Photo Library (sometimes there seems to be a problem with this site - I’m trying to figure it out)
Empics (Press Association)
Nettizen Online Newspaper Directory
News Directory, a guide to all online English-language media (worldwide), over 3,600 newspapers, 4,800 magazines, hundreds of television stations plus colleges, visitor bureaus, governmental agencies, travel links, and comics ; more than 14,500 links in all
NI (News International) Syndication
Reuters

Or you could check dedicated photojournalist resources :

Association of Photographers
EPUK (Editorial Photographers United Kingdom & Ireland)
NPPA (National Press Photographers Association)
NUJ (National Union of Journalists)
World Press Photo

Some commercial image collection can be found at (read : you have to pay, subscribe, have credit,…) :

About the Image blog
BAPLA (British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies)
BigStockPhoto
Big White Box
Clipart.com
Corbis
Getty Images
Fotolia
iStockPhoto
Jupiterimages Unlimited
PACA (Picture Archive Council of America)
Stockxpert

Or if you are desperately seeking historical images, have a look here :

UNESCO’s Archival Portal, an enormous portal to archives around the world, a bit overwhelming.
UK Public Libraries Page, access to images available at local libraries in the UK
UK Higher Education and Research Libraries, access via these libraries to large image collections, but will take time to search
Sensitive Map, similar as the previous but using a clickable map to direct you to an institution
Libweb, a portal to 7500 libraries in 135 countries which contain of course images
24hourmuseum, a virtual UK museum
Cornucopia, an online database of information about more than 6,000 collections in the UK’s museums, galleries, archives and libraries
Virtual Library Museums Pages, a distributed directory of on-line museums
EIG (Education Image Gallery), nice resource for schools
EnrichUK, a searchable portal linking 150 websites that have been supported with Lottery good causes money from the UK
BBC History
PBS History, some pictures, but mainly movies ; still a nice portal with lots of material including teacher resources (PBS, headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, is a non–profit media enterprise owned and operated by the nation’s 348 public television stations)
Scran, part of the Scran Trust - a registered charity - whose aim is to provide educational access to digital materials representing our material culture and history
British History Online
Best of History Web Sites
Voice of the Shuttle, another overwhelming source of information, I need 48-hour-days

Ok, if you didn’t yet find the right image you need, try some of the following specialist sources :

Directories of museums and art galleries

24hourmuseum (also mentioned as a source for historical images)
Art Guide, the comprehensive internet guide to the art collections of Great Britain and Ireland
Art Museum Network, up-to-date information about the news and activities of more than 200 leading museums around the world including news about the exhibitions, acquisitions, and programs of institutions, and links to all members ; so indirect access to image collections worldwide (well most are American, but other countries are represented as well)
Cornucopia, also mentioned as a source for historical images
Virtual Library Museums Pages, and this one as well

Directories of contemporary art galleries

Artnet.com, actually a place to buy, sell and research fine art online, with over 1,200 galleries in over 250 cities worldwide, more than 100,000 works by over 25,000 artists from around the globe represented on this site ; so lots of art images
AskArt, a comprehensive source for information on contemporary American artists
Gallery Channel, a nice site with information on 8,400 exhibition venues, 21,400 exhibitions and 25,600 artists worldwide - all available for public view, a nice site, easy to access

Other museums with significant online collections

British Museum
Hermitage, a famous museum along the embankment of the River Neva, right in the heart of St Petersburg, Russia
Louvre, situated in Paris as you surely know
Metropolitan Museum of Art, near Central Park, New York
Museum of Modern Art, also in New York between 5th and 6th street
National Gallery in London
National Gallery of Art, Washington
Tate holds the national collection of British art from 1500 and of international modern art. All works can be found on this site.
Victoria and Albert Museum

Or perhaps you are looking for builidings or other architectural images ?

Great Buildings Online, with integrated Google maps ; nice try but too many adds and needs a complete design overhaul ; still nice idea.
Index of Art Historical Sites, no adds, but needs redesigning, although lots of architectural images
RIBApix, another one, better, but search facilities not always optimal

Other aggregated art image collections (some commercial) :

AHDS Visual Arts
American Memory, part of the Library of Congress
Art Resource
ARTstor, aimed at Canadian and American institutions
Bridgeman Education, also aimed at institutions
David Rumsey Visual Collections, both free and subscription based collections
Courtauld Art and Architecture collection
Grove Art, free trial but subscription required later on
OAIster, with Firefox plugin (!)
RLG Camio, for institutions mainly
RLG Cultural Materials
Scholars Resource, lots of teacher resources
Art History Resources on the Web
AICT, Art Images for College Teaching
Artcyclopedia
Smithsonian Art and Design
UCLA Arts Library Sources, interesting portal
ULAN, Union List of Artist Names, search using structured vocabularies (Part of Getty Museum website)
WorldArt Web Kiosk, access the Californian University image database

Not all of us are into history and art. Some might want scientific images :

Via RDN (Resource Discovery Network) : a wealth of information including texts, images, maps, etc.

BIOME (Life Sciences, Health and Medicine)
EEVL (Engineering, Mathematics and Computing)
Gesource (Geography and Environment) -
PSIgate (Physical Sciences) -
(In the future RDN is to be found at Intute)

General scientific image databases :

Science and Society Picture Library (UK based)
Science Photo Library
ScienceImage
Science.gov (USA government)
US Government Resources for Science Images
USA Centres for Disease Control (CDC) Public Health Image Library
Hubble Space Telescope
NASA
NOAA, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
USDA, US Department of Agriculture
USDoD, US Department of Defense
USDOE, US Department of Energy
USFWS, US Fish and Wildlife Service

Medical images

Anatline, a web-based interface for viewing high resolution anatomical images (very nice !)
Bristol Biomed Image Archive, only for Athens member institutions (if your institution is not a member, you can apply via the website)
Images from the History of Medicine, website of the US National Library of Medicine (NLM)
Karolinska Institutet, images provided by Sweden’s largest medical university
Medical Images on the Web, overview of medical image databases provided by the University of Nebraska
MPL Medical Photographic Library
TDR Image Library with a focus on tropical diseases
Viperlib Visual Perception Images, images related to visual perception (obviously…)
Weill Cornell Medical Library directory

Enough about humans ? What about other species ?

Arkive,the Noah’s Ark for the Internet era - a unique global initiative, gathering together into one centralised digital library, films, photographs and audio recordings of the world’s species
Agripicture picture library, a select diverse collection of generic farming images
Biodidac, Biological Images
Canon Photo Gallery, part World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
ImageBank, Higher Education Academy, Centre for Bioscience, UK
Botanical Society of America, online image collection drawings actually

Earth is also a topmodel as we can see in these images :

American Geological Institute Earth Science World Image Bank
Geo-Images Project maintained at Berkeley University by G. Donald Bain, Director of the Geography Computing Facility
Picture Library of the famous Geological Society of London
National (UK) Archive of Geological Photographs

And finally I wanted to include some resources for maps :

Bodleian Library’s Map Room, and that’s exactly what it is, a ‘room’ full of links
Odden’s Bookmarks, enough links to fill a lifetime
National Geographic Maps, always beautifully made
Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection from the University of Texas
David Rumsey Map Collection if you like historical maps
DEMIS World Map Server, a software program to generate maps (not for free…)
Online Map Creation (OMC) Tool, a software package to create high-quality postscript maps in various projections (free)
Timemap TMJava is a novel mapping applet which generates complete interactive maps with a few simple lines of html, and… an open source project of the University of Sydney ; I need to test this as it seems like an awesome application. Anyone tried this already ?
Earthbrowser, software application allowing you to browse the surface of our blue planet (free trial, rated at 23.95$ with updates), including webcams, satellite updates, etc.
Atlas of Cyberspace, an atlas of maps and graphic representations of the geographies of the new electronic territories of the Internet, the World-Wide Web and other emerging Cyberspaces, interesting site
And last but not least Google earth

This list is not intended to be exhaustive. If you know of other resources we should include, please put a comment. Thank you.

Albrecht Dürer (May 21, 1471 – April 6, 1528 ) was a German painter and printmaker from Nuremberg, Germany. His engravings include Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513),

Saint Jerome in his Study (1514)

and Melencolia I (1514).

In 2005, Prospect and Foreign Policy asked to vote for the top global public intellectuals from a longlist of 100 (see the results here). This year they are repeating the exercise, with a new list (A-K and L-Z) reflecting the emerging trends in global thought.

–Weeki Wachee spring, , Florida (1947), by Toni Frissell

You are on a tight budget and you want to buy a PC and software ? Than consider spending everything on a PC and nothing on software. There are lots of free alternatives that will satisfy the needs of 90% among you. A list…

But first some remarks

• The list is aimed at users with a Windows Operating system. Most computers come with a pre-installed version. Those who are working in a Unix(-like) environment don’t really need such a list (there are literally thousands of programs and packages included in the numerous free linux distributions), and Mac OS users, well, perhaps one of the readers can make a list ?
• We have excluded online software as most of this is still a bit basic (although there are some noteble exceptions like Google Reader e.g. — another idea for a list ?)
• I have limited my suggestions to 3 maximum per application.

Browsers

Windows comes with the browser Internet Explorer. But I would strongly suggest to install some free alternatives : Mozilla Firefox, Opera or Flock.

Communication, networking, internet

Email : again a Mozilla product,Thunderbird, an e-mail and news client to replace Microsoft Outlook. Possibly you could also add the Lightning extension that adds calendar and scheduling functionality.

Next Pidgin (formerly named Gaim), a multi-platform instant messaging client. The software supports many commonly used instant messaging protocols, allowing the user to log into various different services from one application.Interesting if you love to chat.

I would also suggest Skype. It’s a software program that allows users to make calls over the Internet to other Skype users free of charge (!). Calls to landlines and cell phones can be made for a fee (lower than with traditional means). Additional features include instant messaging, file transfer and video conferencing.

You might want an aggregator to read feeds from sites, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs. Install e.g. Sage, a news aggregator extension for the Firefox browser. It’s a bit basic, but it does what it’s supposed to do without too many bells. If you use Opera, you have an aggregator included already. The same goes for Thunderbird. If you want a more advanced feedreader, than I would definitely go for Feeddemon.

Filezilla is a cross-platform FTP client. Directory Opus and Notepad++ (see below) also include a FTP client, but I prefer Filezilla.

Office suites and document editing

OpenOffice.org comes with a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a presentation program (Impress), a database program (Base), a vector graphics editor (Draw) and a tool for creating and editing mathematical formulae (Math). This open source office suit is a perfect alternative for Microsoft Office. Consider also OxygenOffice Professional which is sort of an enhanced version of OpenOffice.org and comes with extras like templates, cliparts, samples, fonts and VBA support.

Scribus is a desktop publishing (DTP) application known for its broad feature set of page layout features comparable to leading commercial applications such as Adobe PageMaker, QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign.

proTeXt is a free integrated development environment (IDE) for LaTeX which is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. It includes MiKTeX, a text editor ( TeXnicCenter),along with Ghostscript and GSview. I have posted the installation procedure some time ago.

Microsoft Windows systems come with the very simple text editor Notepad. I would recommend to install Notepad++, VIM or PSPad.

PDF (Portable Document Format) is a frequently used document format that requires a special reader. The obvious one is Adobe Reader. If you want to create pdf documents than you can install PDFCreator which allows the user to select PDFCreator as their printer, allowing almost any application to print to PDF. PDF can also be created with OpenOffice.Org and LaTeX. Editing exsiting PDF documents is a bit more ccomplicated. A free one is PDFedit which is an editor for Unix-like operating systems, but can be used on top of Windows if you install Cygwin. I will not start discussing the possibilities of using UNIX on Windows machines in this post as this is (a) a bit more complicated, and (b) there are numerous ways to use Unix software and Windows on the same hardware. As of version 0.46, Inkscape (see below) also allows PDF editing through an intermediate translation step involving poppler.

Security

This is a difficult one. If we stick to the idea of not spending money on software, than ClamWin is a free antivirus software worth considering. AVG is also used by many. If you would spend some money on software, than this is probably the first thing to look at. Professional security software is still way better than open source and/or free software. Look for BitDefender, Norton (slows your system sometimes) or Kaspersky.

Back-up and data management

Cobian Backup supports Unicode, FTP, compression (Zip, SQX), encryption (including Blowfish, Rijndael, DES, RSA-Rijndael), incremental and differential backup.It supports long file names (32.000 chars) on backups except on ZIP backup (256 only). The software may be installed as an application or a service running in the background. Multilingual support is done via user-submitted language files.

Install also 7-Zip, a free open source file archiver, instead of WinZip and WinRAR, which are the main proprietary competitors.

Windows Explorer is the Microsoft application that is part of the Microsoft Windows operating system since Windows 95 and that runs on top of the Windows operating system and provides a graphical user interface for accessing the file systems. I do not see a free system to replace this, but if you have already spend some money on security and you still have some left, than check out Directory Opus, especially if you have huge amounts of files (60 days free trial). It seems that Total Commander and SpeedCommander are good as well, but I have never tried these two.

Media

Where to start ? The choice is huge…

Audio editing/management/player : Audacity (editor), iTunes (management and player), VLC Mediaplayer (eh, player…)

Images : Irfanview is an image viewer that can view, edit, and convert image files (and play video/audio formats) or the very basic application Picasa

Video editing : Avidemux, Virtual Dub or VirtualDubMod. The latter is still available but I think that development has stopped. Still an option to consider.

Graphics : GIMP, a raster graphics editor used to process digital graphics and photographs and often described as a free alternative for Adobe Photoshop, Paint.net, another possible alternative for Photoshop but I prefer GIMP ; Inkscape, “an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format” ; Dia, a general-purpose diagramming software ; and Blender, a 3D animation program. This should allow you to do a lot of decent graphics work already.

Science

I will limit this to software for statistics and mathematics. If someone has experience with software in other scientific domains, let me know.

Statistics : PSPP, definitely and more or less a free alternative for SPSS. And yes, of course Gretl, an application for compiling and interpreting data mainly for econometrics.

Mathematics : SAGE, aimed at creating an “open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and MATLAB”, Maxima, “a system for the manipulation of symbolic and numerical expressions, including differentiation, integration, Taylor series, Laplace transforms, ordinary differential equations, systems of linear equations, polynomials, and sets, lists, vectors, matrices, and tensors. Maxima yields high precision numeric results by using exact fractions, arbitrary precision integers, and arbitrarily precision floating point numbers. Maxima can plot functions and data in two and three dimensions”, and GNU Octave, to perform numerical computations and which is mostly compatible with MATLAB. I know I told you that I would limit suggestions to three, but let’s make an exception here. Have also a look at R and R Commander. R is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics.R Commander is a GUI for the R programming language. Extremely powerful !

Content Management Systems

CMS is perhaps not the best heading for software used for blogging, Wikis, and …CMS.

Let’s start with the blogging software: WordPress.com (hosted for free like this blog e.g.) and WordPress.org (to be hosted by you). Have a look here for other possibilities.

Next Wiki software. Again there are just too many options. Have a look at MediaWiki (used for Wikipedia), TWiki and PmWiki. Or check out the WikiMatrix for a comparaison of Wiki software.

With CMS we mean Web Content Management Systems in this overview. Or software that helps you publishing content to web sites. Have a look at Drupal and Joomla!

No heading

A nice piece of software is also FreeMind, a mind mapping application written in Java. It’s fun and useful at the same time !

You might have noticed that I didn’t include any P2P software. I haven’t seen any that I really like just yet (read : without junk).

And to end this post, one last piece of software : PortableApps. PortableApps.com is a compilation of free and open source applications founded by John T. Haller. The applications run directly from any storage equipment, like a flash drive, iPod, external hard drive, or directly from a computer. Ideal to have your favourite free software on a simple USB flash drive.

There are alternatives for most of the software I suggested in this list, and everyone has probably his own favourites. An endless discussion in some cases. I would however concentrate on one alternative and learn to use all of its features iso swapping software regularly just for some (mis-)perceived advantage.

Suggestions are of course welcome.

In clear, nontechnical language, string theorist Brian Greene explains in this TED video how our understanding of the universe has evolved from Einstein’s notions of gravity and space-time to superstring theory, where minuscule strands of energy vibrating in 11 dimensions create every particle and force in the universe.

Scientists can now tell us what happened in nearly every millisecond of the big bang. Robert Matthews takes us through the first crucial moments.

More detailed information via the Big Bang entry at wikipedia (well written with lots of links).

Celestia is a open source 3-D astronomy program created by Chris Laurel. The program, based on the HIP, allows users to travel through an extensive universe, modelled after reality at any speed, in any direction and at any time in history. Celestia displays and interacts with objects ranging in scale from artificial satellites to entire galaxies in three dimensions using OpenGL, from perspectives which would not be possible from a classic planetarium or other ground based display. Download via Sourceforge.

Similar applications include the free software applications Stellarium and KStars, and the proprietary applications Orbiter, XEphem (both freeware), Starry Night (commercial). WorldWide Telescope, which will be made available in Spring 2008, will also offer features included in Celestia.

(pronounced /ˈleɪtɛk/ or /ˈlɑːtɛk/) is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Essentially LaTeX is a macro package but don’t let this scare you. LaTeX2e is the current version of LaTeX.

Besides some commercial implementations, there are numerous free distributions. The version I use (for Windows *) nowadays is MikTeX, combined with TeXnicCenter (a free open source IDE), along with Ghostscript and GSview. There are other combinations possible, but this one fits my needs. If you want to know more about TeX, LaTeX and why you should use it, this is what CTAN is saying.

Installation

1. First download proTeXt here. Click ProTeXt-2.1-010408.exe and save it on your harddisk. **
2. Once you have the distribution, you can start the installation by running Setup.exe (if it does not open automatically). Or you can install from a pdf named protext-install-en.pdf (you will find this pdf in the install folder from proTeXt). Just open this pdf file and click the links to install (in this order) MikTeX, TeXnicCenter, Ghostscript and GSview.
3. You should be aware that MiKTeX issues regularly updates. So look for ‘Update’ via Start-All Programs-MiKTeX 2.7-Update. Choose where you want to get updates from (I suggest to select ‘random repository’ in this case) and run this. The first time this will take quite some time, but this is normal. Once you have done this, I advise to run the update say once a week.

If you have never used TeX before, then it is recommendable to work through one of the TeX/LaTeX tutorials. A good starting point is this entry in the UK TeX FAQ: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=tutorials*.
But I “promise” to post some tutorials about LaTeX on this blog myself.

* For MacOS X I suggest MacTeX, and for Unix, go for TeX Live, which contains many packages and programs. It is freely available over the Internet or on CD/DVD; see the web page for details. Note that most Unix systems have TeX as an installation option, so you might already have it or be able to easily get it using your system administration package management tool: RPM, or DEB, or whatever.

**Alternatively you can download proTeXt from another server. Search for proTeXt and start the download.

I want to learn to use an abacus ( Britannica - Wikipedia).

Convictions can make men blind.

–Marquis d’Apcher in Brotherhood of the Wolf

A while ago I bought three graphic novels, and tomorrow I’m going to buy another three classic graphic novels:

Blankets is a 600-page black-and-white graphic novel by Craig Thompson, published in 2003 by Shenanigans Productions. A memoir, the book tells the story of Thompson’s childhood in an Evangelical Christian family, his first love, and his early adulthood.

From Hell is a graphic novel by writer Alan Moore and artist Eddie Campbell speculating upon the identity and motives of Jack the Ripper. The title is taken from the first words of the “From Hell” letter, which some authorities believe was an authentic message sent from the killer in 1888. The work is dense, multilayered and immensely detailed; the collected edition is 572 pages long.

Berlin is the title of a comic book series created by Jason Lutes and published by Drawn and Quarterly. Planned as a series of 24 magazines, it describes life in Berlin from 1928 to 1933, during the decline of the Weimar Republic. The first eight magazines were compiled into a book titled Berlin: City of Stones, published in 2000. It starts with Marthe Müller, an art student, arriving in Berlin. One story arc details the start of her life in Berlin, focusing on her relationship to journalist Kurt Severing. A second story line describes a working class family which breaks up due to differing political views, the mother eventually joining the communists with their daughters, while the father takes their son to the Nazis. The book ends on May 1, 1929, the International Workers Day. The next eight magazines will be compiled in Berlin book two: City of Smoke and will be released on August 19, 2008.

As you probably know Google has published a variety of logos commemorating holidays and events. All (?) of them are displayed in a sort of online museum. Have always considered this to be a nice idea. No idea if any other company is doing something similar.

Expo 58, also known as the Brussels World’s Fair, Brusselse Wereldtentoonstelling or Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Bruxelles, was held from April 17 to October 19, 1958. It was the first major World’s Fair after World War II.

Poème électronique (”Electronic Poem”) is a piece of electronic music by composer Edgard Varèse written especially for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, and was recorded to be played back from 425 loudspeakers, placed at specific points in the Philips Pavilion, designed by Iannis Xenakis while under the employ of Le Corbusier.

«Poème électronique» is the first, electronic-spatial environment to combine architecture, film, light and music to a total experience made to function in time and space. Under the direction of Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenaki’s concept and geometry designed the World’s Fair exhibition space adhering to mathematical functions. Edgard Varèse composed the both concrete and vocal music which enhanced dynamic, light and image projections conceived by Le Corbusier. Varèse’s work had always sought the abstract and, in part, visually inspired concepts of form and spatial movements. Among other elements for «Poème électronique» he used machine noises, transported piano chords, filtered choir and solo voices, and synthetic tone colorings. With the help of the advanced technical means made available through the Philips Pavilion, the sounds of this composition for tape recorder could wander throughout the space on highly complex routes. (source)

A recording of Poème électronique:

The Contextualizer: Arthur Lubow portrays Prizker prizewinner Jean Nouvel.

Into the Eisenshpritz. Elif Batuman looks at the latest publications in the world of the graphic novel and explains the attractions of the super heroes and their younger siblings. It’s their double character we find so fascinating.

Dushu (simplified Chinese: 读书; pinyin: Dúshū, Reading in Chinese) is a monthly Chinese literary magazine. First published in April 1979 with its leading article No Forbidden Zone in Reading, it has great influence in Chinese intellects.

In the New Left Review of Jan-Feb 2008 Zhang Yongle provides a detailed history of the magazine entitled No Forbidden Zone in Reading. The survey relates the journal’s trajectory to the PRC’s dramatic development course and ruptures within its intelligentsia. A very interesting article that gives a good window on intellectual debates in the PRC since the mid nineties and the discussions going on about the (partial ?) adoptation of the capitalist model in China. See also e.g. wikipedia on the Chinese New Left and the Chines Liberals.

Another overview of the differing voices and views of leading Chinese thinkers, debating the future of their society and its place in the world, can be found in One China, Many Paths, a collection of essays reflecting the new thinking that developed in the 1990s. Both Chinese liberal and Chinese New Left views are represented, along with some views that do not fit either category (review of this book by Ban Wang).

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

–Izumi Shikibu (translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani, from The Ink Dark Moon)

25 best Bush cartoons according to David Horsey.