Old Peter's Russian Tales, the Brain Spect Atlas, Cyclodic Art & More

Old Peter's Russian Tales

Note: the tales are at the margin. Click to read each.

"THE stories in this book are those that Russian peasants tell their children and each other. In Russia hardly anybody is too old for fairy stories, and I have even heard soldiers on their way to the war talking of very wise and very beautiful princesses as they drank their tea by the side of the road. I think there must be more fairy stories told in Russia than anywhere else in the world. In this book are a few of those I like best. I have taken my own way with them more or less, writing them mostly from memory. They, or versions like them, are to be found in the coloured chap-books, in Afanasiev's great collection, or in solemn, serious volumes of folklorists writing for the learned. My book is not for the learned, or indeed for grown-up people at all. No people who really like fairy stories ever grow up altogether. This is a book written far away in Russia, for English children who play in deep lanes with wild roses above them in the high hedges, or by the small singing becks that dance down the gray fells at home. Russian fairyland is quite different. Under my windows the wavelets of the Volkhov (which has its part in one of the stories) are beating quietly in the dusk. A gold light burns on a timber raft floating down the river. Beyond the river in the blue midsummer twilight are the broad Russian plain and the distant forest. Somewhere in that forest of great trees-a forest so big that the forests of England are little woods beside it-is the hut where old Peter sits at night and tells these stories to his grandchildren."


The Knight's Tale

This great medieval poem clearly embeds a lesson of some sort and at the same time offers high adventure. Here is a sample of a new translation as well as what may be behind the poem and the translator's quest to offer up a new translation.

"Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the finest surviving examples of Middle English poetry, but little is known about the author - except hints that he came from the north of England. How could fellow poet and Northerner Simon Armitage resist the challenge of translating this grisly story for a modern audience?"


Open Source Windows

"Free and open-source software is good for you and for the world. This is the best Windows software that we know of. No adware, no spyware, just good software."
And it is free! no matter what your field or your specialty, you need the best tools available. Look over this extensive list. You might find just what you will need to help you


Images of Human Behavior:A Brain SPECT Atlas

We have learned so much in recent these past few years by brain scanning. See the table of contents (pull down) on this home page.

"Excerpted from Dr. Daniel Amen's Book "Images of Human Behavior: A Brain Spect Atlas" this color atlas contains 115 pages of brain SPECT images. It compares normal to abnormal brain images and looks at functional neuroanatomy. Includes detailed study of strokes, dementia, brain trauma, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, PMS, anxiety, ADD (attention deficit disorder), obsessive compulsive spectrum disorders, violence, alcohol and drug abuse, with before and after treatment studies. This comprehensive atlas is a wonderful overview of Brain SPECT Imaging, and it also a good resource to teach patients about the effects of brain problems on behavior."


The Antislavery Literature Project

Use the navigation bar on this page. The slave narratives are, for me, especially moving. The Library of Congress has a huge compilation of these narratives.

"The goal of the Antislavery Literature Project is to increase public access to a body of literature crucial to understanding African American experience, US and hemispheric histories of slavery, and early human rights philosophies. These multilingual collections contribute to an educational consciousness of the role of many antislavery writers in creating contemporary concepts of freedom. Antislavery literature represents the origins of multicultural literature in the United States. It is the first body of American literature produced by writers of diverse racial origins. It encompasses slave narratives, lectures, travel accounts, political tracts, prose fiction, poetry, drama, religious and philosophical literature, compendia, journals, manifestoes and children's literature. There is a complex and contradictory range of voices, from journalistic reportage to sentimental poetry, from racial paternalism and stereotyping to advocacy of interracial equality, from religious disputation to militant antislavery calls. In its whole, this literature is inseparable from an understanding of democratic development in US society."


Museum of Cycladic Art

"The Cycladic culture, active on the Cyclades, a cluster of islands in central Aegean, between 3200 and 2000 B.C., may now be studied only by its archaeological remains. The collection contains 350 objects representative of every phase or type of artefact those islanders have left us, be that marble sculpture, pottery, or metal ware. Among the exhibits, the marble figurines, mostly female, claim prime position. One of the most important assemblages of Cycladic art world-wide, this collection provides the opportunity to study aspects of religion, cult, warfare and every-day life on the Cyclad."

There are also additional collections given at this URL.