Search Results

This chapter demonstrates that simple mathematical methods can be used to design mazes that resemble user-supplied target images. The first approach discussed here is the TSP method, which involves converting the target image into a stipple drawing, and then treating the dots as the cities of a Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). Another approach involves replacing the TSP with a much easier optimization problem—the problem of finding a minimum spanning tree (MST). The chapter then introduces a hybrid approach that produces mazes that have both the random textures of the original TSP Art and MST Art mazes and also the directional textures of the phyllotactic mazes. Finally, the chapter describes how to form a maze by constructing an image mosaic out of the vortex tiles.

A look at the impoverished working-class city of Pittsburgh that Maurice Costello was born into in 1877. Amid devastating economic and social unrest, his Irish immigrant mother struggles to support herself and her infant son after the death of his father in the steel mills. As Maurice reaches adulthood, the rise of Irish Americans in the entertainment world offers a way out. He cuts his professional teeth with the Harry Davis Company inthe heart of the city’s vibrant theatrical district, before striking out on his own as a traveling actor.

John Daido Loori was raised a Catholic in Jersey City. Not comfortable with Catholicism as a kid, as an adult he explored various religions, finally finding his way to Zen, which he studied for fourteen years before becoming a Zen priest and returning to the East Coast from California to teach. Loori views Zen as adapting, over and over, to specific cultures while never losing its integrity and power, using its ancient wisdom to take Master Buddha's Traveling Enlightenment Show from one country to another, from one millennium to another. This chapter explores his life and beliefs. Even after studying Zen's lay and monastic traditions, Loori is thoroughly American—a childhood in Jersey City is hard to put behind you.

After the abolition of serfdom and slavery, Russian and American artists created oil paintings of peasants and African Americans that revealed to viewers the complexity of their post-emancipation experiences. Russian painters from the Society of Traveling Art Exhibitions and American artists including Henry Ossawa Tanner, William Edouard Scott, and Winslow Homer created thematically similar works that depicted bondage, emancipation, military service, public schooling, and the urban environment. Their compositions shaped nineteenth-century viewers’ conceptions of freedpeople and peasants and molded Russians’ and Americans’ sense of national identity as the two countries reconstructed their societies during an era of substantial political and social reform.

This chapter explores the traveling aspect of the Guiannée through its use of modern transportation, the bus, and its ability to reach a larger, more dispersed community. Historically, several Guiannée groups performed throughout the community, redefining their boundaries through these performances. Today, one Guiannée group travels the community to redefine its community and cultural connections with other members. When the Guiannée arrives at a public place and performs, whether historical or contemporary, the place transforms into a sacred and cultural space where communal ties are renewed. The continuity in cultural spaces establishes and maintains links in the members’ memories between the past and the present.

By way of analyzing the health doctrine of Dr. Zhuang Shuqi 莊淑旂 (1920-2015), arguably the most popular author of traditional medicine in contemporary Taiwan, this paper discovers a surprisingly close alliance between gender role and traditional medicine, an alliance that she created on the basis of the allegedly traditional practice of viewing food as medicine. Instead of promoting the general idea that food has health benefits, Dr. Zhuang used her own personal tragedies to argue for the provocative idea that inappropriate intake of food is what causes people to fall victim to cancer. As each food functions like a double-edged sword, both the major cause of and a powerful tool for coping with cancer, preparing food in the kitchen, in her eyes, becomes comparable to handling effective and dangerous drugs in the “family pharmacy.” As the result, Dr. Zhuang urged housewives to identify themselves with the role of the “family pharmacist” and to take responsibility for the health of the whole Family.”

This chapter considers Hamiltonian graphs, a class of graphs named for nineteenth-century physicist and mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton. In 1835 Hamilton discovered that complex numbers could be represented as ordered pairs of real numbers. That is, a complex number a + bi (where a and b are real numbers) could be treated as the ordered pair (a, b). Here the number i has the property that i² = -1. Consequently, while the equation x² = -1 has no real number solutions, this equation has two solutions that are complex numbers, namely i and -i. The chapter first examines Hamilton's icosian calculus and Icosian Game, which has a version called Traveller's Dodecahedron or Voyage Round the World, before concluding with an analysis of the Knight's Tour Puzzle, the conditions that make a given graph Hamiltonian, and the Traveling Salesman Problem.

This chapter explores the role of media and new media technologies and the ways in which prayers and spirits travel and circulate among local and global audiences. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Pentecostal religious practitioners in Germany and Vietnam, and in particular in a prayer camp on the Lorelei cliff at the Rhine river, this contribution investigates how media technologies affect place, space, and the effort to fill an assumed “spiritual vacuum” in diasporic Vietnamese Pentecostal networks. Referring to the image of the sinking Titanic, sermons and prayers recall experiences of flight and migration. The focus on practices of mediation demonstrates how ideas about the supernatural, the spiritual, and the transcendental are made accessible for believers, how they are reconsidered via media, and especially how spirits travel across borders.

The introduction lays out the intentions of this intellectual history of contemporary Indonesian Islam. As a history of ideas, the book is theoretically framed by the notions of “circulation of ideas”, developed in South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies, and Edward Said’s “traveling theory”. It is further informed by Zygmunt Bauman’s explanation of the role of intellectuals in Legislators and Interpreters and Bruce Robbins’ interpretation of intellectual work in Secular Vocations. It outlines the analysis of the rise of a new generation of Muslim intellectuals who are not only critical citizens vis-à-vis the state, but who have also interrogated the intellectual and political credentials of earlier generations of Muslim activists and leaders, and who have their own ideas about the localization of Islam and how Indonesian nation-building relates to regional, transregional, and global contexts.