Over-congestion and limited resources had forced many Shao-hsing and Ning-po people to earn their livings elsewhere, a phenomenon which deeply struck a scholar-official of Shanghai in the sixteenth century.

When they build a machine, if they do the calculations right, the machine works and you get this intense... uhh... just like a geekasm, from knowing that what you created in your mind and on the computer is actually doing what you told it to do.

The soldiers exposed themselves by moving into unfamiliar territory.

New objects, new amusements, will occupy her mind; and unhappiness, equally unsuspected and unspoken, will die of its own nonentity.