Our wiki is a comprehensive encyclopedia of online and offline aesthetics! We are a community dedicated to the identification, observation, and documentation of visual schemata.
What is an aesthetic? Why does everyone always argue about what aesthetics should be on this wiki?
The short answer: A collection of visual schema that creates a "mood."
Some types of aesthetics include:
Aesthetics originated from Internet communities (Ex: Cottagecore, Dark Academia)
National cultures (Americana, Traditional Polish) Note: Most articles that try to describe a national culture will be deleted. These articles should have a higher quality and risk stereotyping a nation.
Genres of fiction with established visual tropes (Ex: Cyberpunk, Gothic)
Holidays with iconic imagery and colors (Ex: Christmas, Halloween)
Locations that have expected activities, components, and types of people (Ex: Fanfare, Urbancore)
Music genres with consistent visual motifs present in cover art, music videos, etc (Ex: City Pop, Emo)
This does not mean all music genres should be present. For example, Pop and Alternative bands' do not have shared visual traits.
Periods of history with distinct visuals (Ex: Victorian, Y2K)
Stereotypes (Ex: Brocore, VSCO)
Subcultures that share music genres and fashion styles (Ex: Raver, Skinheads)
The long answer:
The word "aesthetic" originated as the philosophical discussion about what beauty is, how we should approach it, and why it exists. However, Millennials and Generation Z started using that term as an adjective that describes what they personally consider beautiful. For example: "After Denise finished watching The Virgin Suicides, she said, 'Wow. That was so aesthetic.'"
Aesthetics have now come to mean a collection of images, colors, objects, music, and writings that creates a specific emotion, purpose, and community. It is largely dependent on personal taste, cultural background, and exposure to different pieces of media. This definition is not official and can be debated. There is currently no dictionary definition that captures the complexity of this phenomenon, which arose in the Internet youth. Rather, people who participate in the community "know it when they see it." These elements are constantly debated, as the opinion on whether or not some aesthetics exist or are valid is constantly debated. This is especially true since everyone's own personal life factors into their opinions.
Here is an example of a debate that is going on within the community. Whether or not Lolita is an aesthetic varies on what counts as visual elements. On one hand, lace, petticoats, and bows are valid elements of visual schema. Those elements combine to spark feelings of kawaii, de-sexualization, rebellion, and appreciation of antique. On the other hand, aesthetics are made up of elements other than fashion, such as home decor or music. Fashion is the visual element, rather than the components making up the coord/outfit. That element is part of broader schemas such as Goth and Victorian. What counts as an element and what qualifies as sparking an emotion is a complicated subject.
So right now, the subject is trying to be defined by the community. What either fits into a larger schema or is distinct enough to warrant its own aesthetic is difficult to say and would depend on who you are asking.
The Digital Curator application allows you to explore the art collections of Central European museums and search for artworks based on specific motifs.
Users of the application can build their combination of objects and reveal how often the subject has occurred across the centuries, view graphics, drawings, or paintings that represent it in different epochs, and compare data with other themes.
The Digital Curator offers a quantitative view of cultural history based on the frequency of symbols and iconographic themes in many artifacts, not on a detailed observation of individual items. This distant viewing can be especially useful if our interest is aimed at exploring a genre, rather than a specific work, to understand the overall social conditions, rather than the life of a particular artist, or to interpret the overall political situation, rather than the views of the selected author. Exploring big cultural-historical data may bring new insights into abstract social phenomena such as cultural and economic influence, canon issues, the relationship between the center and the periphery, or the functioning of the art market. It can also help us better observe the migration of motifs and their takeover across centuries and distant regions.
The Digital Curator database now contains 196 116 works from the collections of 91 museums from Austria, Bavaria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. 71 410 of these works are available under an open license, so it is possible to view them online. Other works are used only as a basis for statistics, presenting the frequency of occurrence of motifs. The AI library for machine learning TensorFlow and the computer service Google Cloud including the tool Google Cloud Vision were used for the automatic detection of the depicted motifs. Data search and storage is performed using the ElasticSearch database and the operation of the application is provided by the Google App Engine service.
Implementation was carried out with the kind support of the UMPRUM, Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague , the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic the Slovak National Gallery, and the BlueGhost digital agency. Thanks also go to many museums that made it possible to use their digitized collections, and to Richard Prajer, Radim Hašek, and Eva Škvárová who helped with the development of the application and the preparation of the database.
The project was designed by Lukas Pilka in 2019-22.
Kid Pix just became pubic domain, so the remade (but pretty much exactly the same) version is now available here.
Native Land Digital strives to create and foster conversations about the history of colonialism, Indigenous ways of knowing, and settler-Indigenous relations, through educational resources such as our map and Territory Acknowledgement Guide. We strive to go beyond old ways of talking about Indigenous people and to develop a platform where Indigenous communities can represent themselves and their histories on their own terms. In doing so, Native Land Digital creates spaces where non-Indigenous people can be invited and challenged to learn more about the lands they inhabit, the history of those lands, and how to actively be part of a better future going forward together.
The Importance of Land
Land is something sacred to all of us, whether we consciously appreciate it or not — it is the space upon which we play, live, eat, find love, and experience life. The land is ever-changing and ever-shifting, giving us — and other creatures and beings on the earth — an infinite number of gifts and lessons.
For Native Land Digital, what we are mapping is more than just a flat picture. The land itself is sacred, and it is not easy to draw lines that divide it up into chunks that delineate who “owns” different parts of land. In reality, we know that the land is not something to be exploited and “owned”, but something to be honoured and treasured. However, because of the complexities of history, the kind of mapping we undetake is an important exercise, insofar as it brings an awareness of the real lived history of Indigenous peoples and nations in a long era of colonialism.
We aim to improve the relationship of people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, with the land around them and with the real history and sacredness of that land. This involves acknowledging and righting the wrongs of history, and also involves a personal journey through the importance of connecting with the earth, its creatures, and its teachings.
Thus, while we make a strong effort to teach about colonialism and to bring forth Indigenous narratives, we also strive to integrate what is sometimes called an “Indigenous way of knowing” when it comes to the importance and sacredness of land in our daily lives. We hope to inspire people to gain a better understanding of themselves, their ancestors, and the world they live in, so that we can all move forward into a better future.
This is a chronological gallery of physical visualizations and related artifacts, maintained by Pierre Dragicevic and Yvonne Jansen.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.208.6726&rep=rep1&type=pdf
An interactive visualisation of climate model data across time and space.
The Voynichese project (VP) defines a simple syntax for querying words in the Voynich Manuscript. While this syntax is only used internally, by the VP's query processor, it's important to be aware of how it operates in order to effectively query the manuscript.
Note that, unlike most query languages, Voynichese queries are evaluated at the word level. As such, word delimiters like whitespace and punctuation are not allowed.
Voynichese queries may use the following characters:
a,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,v,x,y,z,*,^,$
The characters a-z each match the corresponding EVA character.
The wildcard character "*" matches one or more EVA characters. Note that the wildcard may also be represented as a dash "-", for example when used in an URL.
The "^" character matches the start of a word.
The "$" character matches the end of a word.
For example, the query ^daiin$ will exactly match the EVA word daiin, whereas the query daiin (excluding the ^ and $ symbols) will match any EVA word containing daiin, such as chodaiindy.
https://law.duke.edu/sites/default/files/centers/cspd/musiccomic/Theft.pdf
This comic lays out 2000 years of musical history. A neglected part of musical history. Again and again there have been attempts to police music; to restrict borrowing and cultural cross-fertilization. But music builds on itself. To those who think that mash-ups and sampling started with YouTube or the DJ’s turntables, it might be shocking to find that musicians have been borrowing—extensively borrowing—from each other since music began. Then why try to stop that process? The reasons varied. Philosophy, religion, politics, race—again and again, race—and law. And because music affects us so deeply, those struggles were passionate ones. They still are.
The history in this book runs from Plato to Blurred Lines and beyond. You will read about the Holy Roman Empire’s attempts to standardize religious music with the first great musical technology (notation) and the inevitable backfire of that attempt. You will read about troubadours and church composers, swapping tunes (and remarkably profane lyrics), changing both religion and music in the process. You will see diatribes against jazz for corrupting musical culture, against rock and roll for breaching the color-line. You will learn about the lawsuits that, surprisingly, shaped rap. You will read the story of some of music’s iconoclasts—from Handel and Beethoven to Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Ray Charles, the British Invasion and Public Enemy.
To understand this history fully, one has to roam wider still—into musical technologies from notation to the sample deck, aesthetics, the incentive systems that got musicians paid, and law’s 250 year struggle to assimilate music, without destroying it in the process. Would jazz, soul or rock and roll be legal if they were reinvented today? We are not sure. Which as you will read, is profoundly worrying because today, more than ever, we need the arts.
All of this makes up our story. It is assuredly not the only history of music. But it is definitely a part—a fascinating part—of that history. We hope you like it.
This timeline is the result of researching the origins of digital paint and draw software, and the tools that were developed to allow for hand manipulation (versus plotter drawn) drawing and painting - the mouse, light pen & drawing tablet. If we look at the software that has become commonplace today (such as adobe photoshop), which allows for painting, animation and photo manipulation in one, we can trace the roots of this software to the University and Corporate Labs that housed large computers with advanced capabilities for their time - MIT Lincoln Labs & Radiation Labs, DARPA & the Augmented Research Centre (ARC), Bell Labs, NYIT’s Computer Graphics Lab, Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (Xerox PARC), NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL). The artistic collaborations that grew out of these labs fueled the advent of Computer Graphics, Computer Art and Video Art from the 1960's to the 1990's.
This visual timeline starts by tracing the paint systems, frame buffers, and graphic user interfaces created out of these labs, with a focus on the first paint/draw software and the various drawing tools. I am interested in how the larger corporate, and often Military Funded laboratories, effected the dawn of the personal computer and the introduction of the personal computer to the home. This timeline continues through the 1980’s, with a focus on the software and hardware that was developed for the home market from late 1970's to the 1990's.
All The Tropes is a community-edited wiki website dedicated to discussing Creators, Works, and Tropes -- the people, projects and patterns of creative writing in all kinds of entertainment: television, literature, movies, video games, and more.
The Hidden Palace is a community dedicated to the preservation of video game development media
Table of Contents
Creative Coding History
Modern Creative Coding Uses
Graphics Concepts
Creative Coding Environments and Libraries
Communication Protocols
Multimedia Tools
Unique Displays and Touchscreens
Hardware
Other output options
More resources
Originally captured as the medium for Ed Ruscha’s creative work, the more than 65,000 photographs selected from this archive present a unique view of one of Los Angeles’ quintessential streets, Sunset Boulevard, and how it has changed over the past 50 years. Ed Ruscha, with help from Getty and Stamen Design, is making this amazing collection accessible to you: explore his images of Sunset and discover your own story of Los Angeles.
Explore the inventions, technology and ideas of science fiction writers
Date Device Name (Novel Author)
1634 Weightlessness (Kepler) (from Somnium (The Dream) by Johannes Kepler)
1638 Weightlessness in Space (from The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin)
1638 Gansas (from The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin)
1657 Moon Machine - very early description (from A Voyage to the Moon by Cyrano de Bergerac)
1705 Cogitator (The Chair of Reflection) (from The Consolidator by Daniel Defoe)
1726 Knowledge Engine - machine-made expertise (from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift)
1726 Geometric Modeling - eighteenth century NURBS (from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift)
1726 Bio-Energy - produce electricity from organic material (from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift)
1726 Laputa - a floating island (from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift)
1727 Androide - the original (from Cyclopaedia by Ephraim Chambers)
The new Collection online
From Dürer to the Rosetta Stone, explore 4.5 million objects.
The database is based on the British Museum's collection management tool, where we record what we know about our collection. It was created for the Museum to store information for its own use, and is therefore full of specialised terms, abbreviations and shorthand.
The Museum has been working on the database for more than 40 years and, even with more than two million records, we've only catalogued about half of the collection. We're adding and improving records every day but, even so, an object record may not have been checked. In many cases, the most recent research has not yet been added. There will be mistakes and omissions, but the Museum chooses to publish the data, rather than hold it until it is 'finished', as there will always be new information about an object. Only personal and sensitive information has been withheld.
The visualization shows the most used colors of 50 artists. Each artist has their individual color footprint. The shown colors are aggregated and size doesn't represent the actual usage of the particular color by the artist to reduce the complexity inside the application.
You can select each color to find related colors – ones that the artist often used together with that color or other artists frequently used together with that color. If you like a color, you can copy the tone or add it to a collection and export it later.
Writing Machines is a resource dedicated to various projects related to electronic literature/books/writing/art curated by Julia Garcia
And 5,000 years ago, in what is now southeast Turkey, a group of Bronze Age humans created an elaborate set of sculpted stones hailed as the world’s oldest gaming pieces upon their discovery in 2013. From Go to backgammon, Nine Men’s Morris and mancala, these were the cutthroat, quirky and surprisingly spiritual board games of the ancient world.
Literary analysts have long noticed the hand of another author in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. Now a neural network has identified the specific scenes in question—and who actually wrote them.
For much of his life, William Shakespeare was the house playwright for an acting company called the King’s Men that performed his plays on the banks of the River Thames in London. When Shakespeare died in 1616, the company needed a replacement and turned to one of the most prolific and famous playwrights of the time, a man named John Fletcher.
This guide favors authenticity over accuracy, and it aims to entertain before it informs. It is only as accurate as it feels it needs to be. It is constantly changing and it is infinitely mutable, so the map, the music, and my self-righteous opinions are all subject to change as I discover, investigate, and incorporate new knowledge and more music. Nothing is definitive.
This is an educational resource, not a music sharing service. There are no complete songs here. All tracks are low quality sub-2 minute samples. If you want the music, do the artists a solid and buy it from them through legitimate channels.
My goal is to include scripts from indigenous and minority cultures who are in danger of losing their sense of history, identity and purpose and who are trying to protect, preserve and/or revive their writing system as a way of reconnecting to their past, their dignity, their sense of a way ahead.
A traditional script is a visual reminder of a people’s identity — as we can tell by the number of cultures that continue to use their script as an emblem (on printed invitations, on shop fronts, even on the national flag) long after most people have stopped using it for everyday purposes.
In 1967, Swedish National Television was granted a rare interview with Victor Hasselblad at his home. In this video we also get a glimpse into the Hasselblad manufacturing facilities in Gothenburg, Sweden. The Hasselblad camera made its huge breakthrough when the American astronauts began to use it in space. The photographs of the first men on the Moon are some of the most published images in the world. The camera also figured largely for more earthbound photographers, amateurs and professionals alike, working in the fields of advertising, fashion, photojournalism, portraiture, nature, science and medicine. The idea for his camera came to Victor Hasselblad (1906-78) in his youth when he travelled around the Swedish countryside to photograph birds. Never really satisfied with his results, he began to dream about a better camera. This remarkable footage gives us an insight into the man whose idea of a camera – and camera system – is as admired today as it was ground-breaking over 75 years ago.
Water Yam is an artist's book[1] by the American artist George Brecht. Originally published in Germany, June 1963[2] in a box designed by George Maciunas and typeset by Tomas Schmit, it has been re-published in various countries several times since. It is now considered one of the most influential artworks released by Fluxus,[3] the internationalist avant-garde art movement active predominantly in the 1960s and '70s. The box, sometimes referred to as a Fluxbox or Fluxkit, contains a large number of small printed cards, containing instructions known as event-scores, or fluxscores. Typically open-ended, these scores, whether performed in public, private or left to the imagination, leave a lot of space for chance and indeterminancy, forcing a large degree of interpretation upon the performers and audience.
http://www.mtmad.fr
Musée des Tissus et musée des Arts décoratifs,
Lyon - France
Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987) took a lot of photographs, making an obsessive’s visual diary of what and who we saw. Now we can see 130,000 of Warhol’s photos on 3,600 contact sheets and corresponding negatives at the Andy Warhol Photography Archive, a project run by Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center and Stanford Libraries. “He snapped photos at discos, dinner parties, flea markets, and wrestling matches,” say notes on the archive acquired from The Andy Warhol Foundation in 2014. “Friends, boyfriends, business associates, socialites, celebrities, passers by: all captured Warhol’s attention – at least for the moment he looked through the lens.”
http://cantorcollections.stanford.edu/IT_267?sid=18&x=38732&display=thu&x=38733
A painstaking investigation of Europe’s cave art has revealed 32 shapes and lines that crop up again and again and could be the world’s oldest code.
Albert-Charles-Auguste Racinet (1825–1893), himself an accomplished artist, is best known today for publishing two major pictorial works on the history of design — Le costume historique and L’Ornement polychrome — while engraver and artistic director at the Parisian publisher Firmin Didot et Cie. Published in ten instalments between 1869 and 1873, the first iteration of L’Ornement polychrome (Colour ornament) is a visual record in 100 plates of the decorative arts from antiquity to the eighteenth century. The work was such a huge success that in 1885–7 Racinet brought out a second series, this time of 120 plates, and updated to include designs of the nineteenth century as well. The imagery presented in both series is drawn from a wide array of various mediums, including woodwork, metalwork, architecture, textiles, painting, and pottery, and from cultures all over the world.
Although based on past masterpieces of design, the fantastic reproductions in L’Ornement polychrome, carried out by a number of skilled commercial artists of the day, can be considered works of art in their own right. Indeed, for Racinet, the purpose of such a compilation of past design excellence was not only to celebrate the masters of the past but also to inspire an improvement of decorative arts in his own day and age.
The images featured here come from an excellent set of scans by RawPixel from their own 1888 edition of the first series. You can also leaf through the work in book form (again the first series) over at the New York Public Library.
What is Open Library?
Our goal is to provide a page on the web for every book ever published.
At its heart, Open Library is a catalog. The project began in November 2007 and has been inhaling catalog records from some of the biggest libraries in the world ever since. We have well over 20 million edition records online, provide access to 1.7 million scanned versions of books, and link to external sources like WorldCat and Amazon when we can. The secondary goal is to get you as close to the actual document you're looking for as we can, whether that is a scanned version courtesy of the Internet Archive, or a link to Powell's where you can purchase your own copy.
A collaborative reading experiment with Mary Shelley’s classic novel.
Frankenbook is a collective reading and collaborative annotation experience of the original 1818 text of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The project launched in January 2018, as part of Arizona State University’s celebration of the novel’s 200th anniversary. Even two centuries later, Shelley’s modern myth continues to shape the way people imagine science, technology, and their moral consequences. Frankenbook gives readers the opportunity to trace the scientific, technological, political, and ethical dimensions of the novel, and to learn more about its historical context and enduring legacy.
By David Shultz
Apr. 22, 2016 , 10:15 AM
When it comes to the origin of Western fairy tales, the 19th century Brothers Grimm get a lot of the credit. Few scholars believe the Grimms were actually responsible for creating the tales, but academics probably didn’t realize how old many of these stories really are. A new study, which treats these fables like an evolving species, finds that some may have originated as long as 6000 years ago.
The basis for the new study, published in Royal Society Open Science, is a massive online repository of more than 2000 distinct tales from different Indo-European cultures known as the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index, which was compiled in 2004. Although not all researchers agree on the specifics, all modern Indo-European cultures (encompassing all of Europe and much of Asia) descended from the Proto-Indo-European people who lived during the Neolithic Period (10,200 B.C.E.–2000 B.C.E.) in Eastern Europe. Much of the world’s modern language is thought to have evolved from them.
Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville uses the phonautogram to record the human voice by tracing sound waves on smoke-blackened paper or glass. The resulting tracings could not be played back at the time, but in 2008 several tracings from 1860 were processed as digital audio files and successfully played back (1853)
This project will fund the production, via crowd sourcing, of a never-before-released translation of Herman Melville's classic Moby Dick in Japanese emoji icons.
Methodology
Each of Moby Dick's 6,438 sentences will be translated 3 times by different Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Those results will then be voted on by another set of workers, and the most popular version of each sentence will be selected for inclusion in the book.
Here is a sample of a test run I've done on the first couple of chapters:
In the book, the sentences will be arranged with the Emoji on top of the page and the English sentence at the bottom.
Gian-Carlo Rota is professor of applied mathematics and
philosophy at MIT.
This article has appeared electronically in
Concerns of Young Mathematicians, Volume 4, Issue 25, August 21, 1996, a publication of the Young Mathematicians Net-work.
The article is based on a talk delivered on the occasion
of the Rotafest in April, 1996, and is reprinted with per-
mission of Birkhauser Boston, copyright 1997, ISBN 0-
8176-3866-0, Indiscrete Thoughts by Gian-Carlo Rota, edited by Fabrizio Palombi.
Liquid Television is an animation showcase that appeared on MTV andCartoon Network (later Adult Swim).[2] The first season of Liquid Televisionalso aired on BBC Two in co-production with MTV and Cartoon Network. Ultimately, MTV commissioned three seasons of the show, which was produced by Hanna-Barbera, Martin Cartoons and Colossal Pictures. It has served as the launching point for several high-profile original cartoons, including Beavis and Butt-head and Æon Flux. The show was eventually succeeded by Cartoon Sushi. The bulk of Liquid Television's material was created by independent animators and artists specially for the show, and some previously produced segments were compiled from festivals such as Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation. Mark Mothersbaugh composed the show's theme music. It was broadcast in New Zealand on TV3 and in Australia on SBS.
There were also a large number of animation pieces adapted from the work ofArt Spiegelman's comic compilation, RAW. RAW featured underground cartoonists such as Mark Beyer, Richard Sala, and Peter Bagge. In particular,Dog-Boy by Charles Burns was based on the artist's series from RAW.[3]
Due to the extensive use of licensed music throughout the series (episodes often began with a contemporary music video being "liquified"), full episodes ofLiquid Television have not been seen in any form since its original run. Selected segments from the series, including the first appearances of Æon Flux, were released on two VHS tapes in the late 1990s as The Best of Liquid Television parts one and two. These tapes are long out-of-print. A collection volume, titled Wet Shorts (The Best of Liquid Television), comprising the two VHS tapes, was released on DVD in 1997, but this, too, is out-of-print.
On October 13, 2011, MTVX, MTV's cross media group, announced the return of Liquid Television.[4] It is now a network that is available on the internet and social media. The first content to debut on the network was "F**KING BEST SONG EVERRR" by Wallpaper, available on the website. Full-length episodes featuring the online content and all-new material were released in 2013.
Leonardo da Vinci, “Salvator Mundi” (c.1500), oil on panel, 25 7/8 x 18 in.(65.7 x 45.7 cm) (courtesy Christie’s)
“Salvator Mundi” (c. 1500) sold at Christie’s for $450,312,500 (inc. buyer’s premium) after just under 20 minutes of bidding, becoming the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction. Christie’s hired an outside PR firm for the first time in order to conduct its marketing campaign — branded “The last da Vinci” — which included a video of viewers stunned in awe before the painting. The record price was set despite concerns regarding the precise attribution of the work from figures like Michael Daley, Frank Zöllner, and Jerry Saltz. A Guardian article published last month regarding Walter Isaacson‘s new biography of Leonardo was later revised with an editor’s note explaining that the piece “is the subject of a legal complaint made on behalf of Christie’s International Plc.” Isaacson subsequently took to Facebook to clarify his stance that the work was created by Leonardo.
Sandia National Laboratories charged a panel of outside experts with the task to design a 10,000-year marking system for the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) site, and estimate the efficacy of the system against various types of intrusion. The goal of the marking system is to deter inadvertent human interference with the site. The panel of experts was divided into two teams. This is the report of the A Team; a multidisciplinary group with an anthropologist (who is at home with different, but contemporary, cultures), an astronomer (who searches for extra-terrestrial intelligence), an archaeologist (who is at home with cultures that differ in both time and space from our own), an environmental designer (who studies how people perceive and react to a landscape and the buildings within them), a linguist (who studies how languages change with time), and a materials scientist (who knows the options available to us for implementing our marking system concepts). The report is a team effort. There is much consensus on the design criteria and necessary components of the marking system. Understandably, there is some diversity of opinion on some matters, and this is evident in the text.