Writers on Iraq War

Guardian Unlimited | True colours: Collection of writers' views on Iraq War. Here is Le Carre - "I opposed the war before it began, wrote against it in the Times and marched against it in London. I believed then, and believe now, that this illegal and unprovoked invasion will lead to greater instability and suffering in the region than existed before it was launched."

Heartneing

Is 'network literacy' different?

jill/txt: talk at brown: "'Weblogs: Learning to Write in the Network'"

UI elements

Widgetopia, Collection of Widgets and UI elements from various websites, with notation of their sterling or plate metal qualities: "Widgetopia
Collection of Widgets and UI elements from various websites, with notation of their sterling or plate metal qualities "

On Searching

ongoing On Search, the Series: "This series of essays on the construction, deployment and use of search technology"

Countries Visited

create your own visited country map

The Great Game II + China's Wild West

China's Wild West - 99.09: "In the terrible desert and desolate massif of Xinjiang, the Beijing government faces a volatile mixture of ethnic groups, some of whom are hostile to all that is Chinese.

"In the Hexi Corridor, between the mountain ranges of China's arid, north-central Gansu Province, the Great Wall crumbles to an end. "

The New 'Great Game': "The Caspian region may be the next big gas station, but, as in the Middle East, there are already a lot of men running around throwing matches."

ShangHai Eye - Hu for oil: "while Premier Wen Jiabao rushes around the poultry farms of China, personally wringing the necks of thousands of flu-ridden birds, President Hu Jintao is presumably enjoying himself in the swankiest hotel in Libreville. But it's not all fun and games. Hu is in Africa, doing his bit to solve one of China's biggest problems. "

Peking Blogs

Living in China: "Living in China is a member of the Living on the Planet, a network of regional blogzines around the world. "

danwei: "Danwei.org is a frequently updated website about media and advertising in the People's Republic of China. It is maintained and edited by Jeremy Goldkorn."

The Peking Duck: "A peculiar hybrid of personal journal, dilettantish punditry, pseudo-philosophy and much more, from an Accidental Expat who has made his way from Hong Kong to Beijing and finally to Singapore for reasons that are still not entirely clear to him... "

Oil, Tibet and other bits explained ... Not Shanghai Eye

ShangHai Eye - Not Shanghai Eye: "Stuff for which Shanghai Eye is not responsible, which you may nevertheless enjoy looking at."

Review of the Cambridge Illustrated History of China

ShangHai Eye - China is too big even for a big book: "“THERE IS nothing inevitable about the results of China's confrontation with the West,” Professor Buckley Ebrey writes, “a whole concatenation of contingent events contributed to the outcome.” A sensible statement in a very sensibly written - and handsomely illustrated - history. "

Walt Whitman - Inspiration for Writing

Walt Whitman, Proud Music of the Sea Storm

Then I woke softly,
And pausing, questioning awhile the music of my dream,
And questioning all those reminiscences—the tempest on the sea,
And all the songs of sopranos and tenors,
And those rapt oriental dances, of religious fervor,
And the sweet varied instruments, and the diapason of organs,
And all the artless plaints of love, and grief and death,
I said to my silent, curious Soul, out of the bed of the slumber-chamber,
Come, for I have found the clew I sought so long,
Let us go forth refresh'd amid the day,
Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real,
Nourish'd henceforth by our celestial dream.

And I said, moreover,
Haply, what thou hast heard, O Soul, was not the sound of winds,
Nor dream of stormy waves, nor sea-hawk’s flapping wings, nor harsh scream,
Nor vocalism of sun-bright Italy,
Nor German organ majestic—nor vast concourse of voices—nor layers of harmonies;
Nor strophes of husbands and wives—nor sound of marching soldiers,
Nor flutes, nor harps, nor the different bugle-calls of camps;
But, to a new rhythmus fitted for thee,
Poems, vaguely wafted in night air, uncaught, unwritten,
Which, let us go forth in the bold day, and write.

William Butler Yeats - Wikipedia

William Butler Yeats - Wikipedia: "Some critics claim that Yeats spanned the transition from the nineteenth century into twentieth-century modernism in poetry much as Pablo Picasso did in painting. Others question whether late Yeats really has much in common with modernists of the Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot variety. Modernists read the well-known poem The Second Coming as a dirge for the decline of European civilization in the mode of Eliot, but later critics have pointed out that this poem is an expression of Yeats' apocalyptic mystical theories, and thus the expression of a mind shaped by the 1890s. "

Joseph Brodsky: A Virgilian Hero, Doomed Never to Return Home

Joseph Brodsky: A Virgilian Hero, Doomed Never to Return Home: Poet Brodsky, whom I don't know yet, but who got a nobel prize:

… cities one won't see again. The sun
throws its gold at their frozen windows. But all the same
there is no entry, no proper sum.
There are always six bridges spanning the sluggish river.
There are places where lips touched lips for the first time ever,
or pen pressed paper with real fervor.
There are arcades, colonnades, iron idols that blur your lens.
There the streetcar's multitudes, jostling, dense,
speak in the tongue of a man who's departed thence."

Nobel e-Museum

Nobel e-Museum: "The Official Web Site of The Nobel Foundation

Derek Walcott Profile

The New Yorker: Derek Walcott: "Walcott and I walked to a little grove off the side of the main house. We sat at a table in the shade. The sea crashed against the rocks below us. Walcott began to speak of his marginal existence. "

Also, a useful and reasonable exhaustive (at least more than I can digest quickly) list of related sites.

Mountains of Public Health

Tracy Kidder interviewed on Paul Farmer: "You titled your book after the Haitian proverb 'D?y? m?n gen m?n,' meaning 'beyond mountains there are mountains.' Is this description of the Haitian landscape also symbolic of the obstacles that Paul Farmer and the Haitian people have faced, and continue to face?

Exactly. The proverb as I understand it means 'beyond mountains, more mountains.' But I looked at it harder and saw a verb in there: 'gen.' I think it's the verb 'there are,' or it could be 'one gains'?beyond mountains, one gains mountains. Haitians use the phrase in two different ways: to say that there's no end to obstacles, and also to say that there's no end to opportunities. "

Organizing Design

InfoDesign: Understanding by Design | Special on Louis Rosenfeld: "Information architects need to know something about each of these three areas to ensure their designs are balanced, regardless of whether they're designing content management processes, search interfaces, taxonomies, or anything else. Most of us already know a lot about one of these areas - for example, if you studied organizational behavior in college, you might be considered an expert in context. If that's the case, it might not be a bad idea to 'minor' in the other areas to achieve a more balanced perspective. So you might shore up your knowledge of content by reading up on topics relevant to content creation, like technical communication, journalism, or markup languages. Ditto users: read a book on human factors or ethnographic methods. "

Secure Thoughts

Schneier.com: "IDs and the illusion of security (San Francisco Chronicle, February 3, 2004
'Everywhere, it seems, someone is checking IDs. The ostensible reason is that ID checks make us all safer, but that's just not so. In most cases, identification has very little to do with security.' "

Esoteric links

all things cowboy Courtest of Bowers