Guide book

A guide book or travel guide is "a book of information about a place, designed for the use of visitors or tourists". Travel guides can also take the form of travel websites such as the free and open Wikivoyage.

It will usually include full details relating to accommodation, restaurants, transportation, and activities. Maps of varying detail and historical and cultural information are often included. Different kinds of guide books exist, focusing on different aspects of travel, from adventure travel to relaxation, or aimed at travelers with different incomes, or focusing on sexual orientation or types of diet.

History

Antiquity

A forerunner of the guidebook was the periplus, an itinerary from landmark to landmark of the ports along a coast. A periplus such as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea was a manuscript document that listed, in order, the ports and coastal landmarks, with approximate intervening distances, that the captain of a vessel could expect to find along a shore. This work was possibly written in the middle of the 1st century CE. It served the same purpose as the later Roman itinerarium of road stops.

Taipei

Taipei (/ˌtaɪˈpeɪ/, literally means "North of Tai(wan)"), officially known as Taipei City (Chinese: 臺北市 or 台北市; pinyin: Táiběi Shì; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Tâi-pak Chhī), is the capital city and a special municipality of Taiwan. Sitting at the northern tip of Taiwan, Taipei City is an enclave of the municipality of New Taipei City. It is about 25 km (16 mi) southwest of the northern port city Keelung. The city is mostly located on the Taipei Basin, an ancient lakebed bounded by the two relatively narrow valleys of the Keelung and Xindian rivers, which join to form the Tamsui River along the city's western border.

The city proper is home to an estimated population of 2,693,672 in 2009, forming the core part of the Taipei–Keelung metropolitan area which includes the nearby cities of New Taipei and Keelung with a population of 6,900,273, the 40th most-populous urban area in the world. The name "Taipei" can refer either to the whole metropolitan area or the city proper.

Taipei is the political, economic, educational, and cultural center of Taiwan, and one of the major hubs of the Chinese-speaking world. Considered to be a global city, Taipei is part of a major high-tech industrial area.Railways, high-speed rail, highways, airports, and bus lines connect Taipei with all parts of the island. The city is served by two airports – Taipei Songshan and Taiwan Taoyuan. Taipei is home to various world-famous architectural or cultural landmarks which include Taipei 101, Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, Dalongdong Baoan Temple, Hsing Tian Kong, Mengjia Longshan Temple, National Palace Museum, Presidential Office Building, Taipei Guest House, Ximending, and several night markets dispersing over the city. Its natural features such as Maokong, Yangmingshan, and hot springs are also well known to international visitors.

Taipei (novel)

Taipei is a 2013 novel by Tao Lin. It is his third novel, his first book in three years, and his seventh book overall.

Background

On August 15, 2011, The New York Observer reported that Lin had sold his third novel, then titled Taipei, Taiwan, to Vintage. Lin's agent, Bill Clegg, brokered the deal with editor Tim O'Connell based on "a 5000-word excerpt and a ~3-page outline", for "$50,000 with a $10,000 bonus if it earns out its advance." Lin reportedly chose Vintage after meeting with four other editors, including those at Little, Brown and Harper Perennial. Earlier that morning the Wall Street Journal broke the news and briefly interviewed Lin on his decision. Lin said, "Vintage/Knopf publishes most of my favorite writers: Lorrie Moore, Ann Beattie, Bret Easton Ellis."

Cover

On February 1, 2013, Entertainment Weekly debuted the cover. The article also included an interview with Lin, who said, of the autobiographical nature of the book:

The article did not comment on the cover, except to say that it was "shiny." Thought Catalog, in an article titled "The Cover For Tao Lin's New Novel Looks Sweet," wondered how it would appear: "The version online is a shiny gif. It will be interesting to see what the cover looks like on a physical copy." Apparently no critics recognized the gif cover as an apparent homage to the underground, avant-garde writer Bradley J. Milton, whose 'Huckleberry Milton' came out two years before.

Mahjong solitaire

Mahjong solitaire is a solitaire matching game that uses a set of mahjong tiles rather than cards. It is also known as Shanghai solitaire, electronic or computerized mahjong, solitaire mahjong and erroneously as mahjong. The tiles come from the four-player game known as mahjong.

Play

The 144 tiles are arranged in a special four-layer pattern with their faces upwards. A tile is said to be open or exposed if it can be moved either left or right without disturbing other tiles. The goal is to match open pairs of identical tiles and remove them from the board, exposing the tiles under them for play. The game is finished when all pairs of tiles have been removed from the board or when there are no exposed pairs remaining.

Tiles that are below other tiles cannot be seen. But by repeated undos and/or restarts which some programs offer, one gradually gets more and more information. Sometimes, tiles are only partially covered by other tiles, and the extent to which such tiles can be distinguished depends on the actual tile set. Playing Mahjong solitaire optimally in the sense to maximize the probability of removing all tiles is PSPACE-complete, and the game gets NP-complete when peeking below tiles is allowed. A sample of 10,000,000 games with the default layout, 'the turtle' (see right), which were analyzed in about 40 hours on a single processor thread, revealed that between 2.95 and 2.96 percent of the turtles cannot be solved even if peeking is allowed.