The history of Buddhism spans from the 6th century BCE to the
present, starting with the birth of the Buddha Siddharta Gautama.
This makes it one of the oldest religions practiced today. Throughout
this period, the religion evolved as it encountered various countries
and cultures, adding to its original Indian foundation Hellenistic as
well as Central Asian, East Asian and Southeast Asian cultural
elements. In the process, its geographical extent became considerable
so as to affect at one time or another most of the Asian continent.
The history of Buddhism is also characterized by the development of
numerous movements and schisms, foremost among them the Theravada,
Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions, punctuated by contrasting periods
of expansion and retreat.
Read the rest of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Buddhism
Today's selected anniversaries:
1642 Abel Tasman led the first European expedition to reach
Tasmania.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasmania)
1859 The Origin of Species by British naturalist Charles Darwin
was first published, and it immediately sold out its
initial print run.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Species)
1904 The first successful caterpillar track was made.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterpillar_track)
1963 Alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was mortally wounded
when Jack Ruby shot him in Dallas, Texas on live national
television.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ruby)
1998 America Online announced it would acquire Netscape
Communications in a stock-for-stock transaction worth
US$4.2 billion.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Communications)
Wikiquote of the day:
"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the
conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty
that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." ~
Václav Havel
(http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/V%C3%A1clav_Havel)
The Indus Valley Civilization (fl. 2800 BCE–1800 BCE) was an ancient
civilization that is so named because its first excavated sites,
Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, were on the Indus river in the northwest of
the Indian sub-continent in present day Pakistan. At its height
around 2200 BCE, the Indus Civilization covered an area larger than
Europe, centered on Mohenjo Daro on the Indus River. The nomenclature
Sindhu-Sarasvati Civilization was introduced into Indian textbooks in
2002, as a new designation for the well-known Indus Valley
civilization. The addition of "Saraswati," an ancient river central
to Hindu myth, is meant to show (or make believe) that Indus Valley
civilization was actually part of Vedic civilization. Research which
identifies the civilization's location with the Vedic Sarasvati river
system mentioned in ancient literature is speculative.
Read the rest of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilization
Today's selected anniversaries:
1718 Off the coast of North Carolina, English pirate Edward
Teach (best known as "Blackbeard") was killed in battle by
a boarding party from HMS Pearl.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbeard)
1963 In Dallas, Texas, U.S. President John F. Kennedy was
assassinated, and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was
sworn-in as the 36th President of the United States.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_assassination)
1975 Juan Carlos was declared King of Spain following the death
of Francisco Franco.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Carlos_of_Spain)
1986 Mike Tyson became the youngest world heavyweight-boxing
champion.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Tyson)
Wikiquote of the day:
"Fame is something which must be won; honor is something which must
not be lost." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
(http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer)
ROT13 is a simple Caesar cipher for obscuring text by replacing each
letter with the letter thirteen places down the alphabet. A becomes
N, B becomes O and so on. The algorithm is used in online forums as a
means of hiding joke punchlines, puzzle solutions, movie and story
spoilers and offensive materials from the casual glance. ROT13 has
been described as the "Usenet equivalent of a magazine printing the
answer to a quiz upside down". ROT13 originated in Usenet Internet
discussions in the early 1980s, and has become a de facto standard.
As a Caesar cipher, ROT13 provides no real cryptographic security and
is not used for such; in fact it is often used as the canonical
example of weak encryption. Because ROT13 scrambles only letters,
more complex schemes have been proposed to handle numbers and
punctuation, or arbitrary binary data.
Read the rest of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROT13
Today's selected anniversaries:
1783 Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent
made the first untethered hot air balloon flight.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_balloon)
1877 Thomas Edison announced his invention of the phonograph.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph)
1969 The first ARPANET link was established.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET)
2002 NATO invited Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania,
Slovakia and Slovenia to become members.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO)
Wikiquote of the day:
"The one important thing I have learned over the years is the
difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's
self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is
disastrous." ~ Margot Fonteyn
(http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Margot_Fonteyn)
The Zuiderzee Works were a massive hydraulic engineering project
undertaken by the Netherlands during the 20th century. They were
built to protect land from flooding and to reclaim land in extensive
polders, for farming and housing. Original plans for the works date
back to the 17th century, but it was not until 1913, when Cornelis
Lely became minister of transport, that official planning started.
The single biggest structure in the project was a 32 km long dam, the
Afsluitdijk, protecting the Dutch from the North Sea. But to test the
waters the small Amsteldiepdijk was built first, construction of
which lasted four years and proved to be a valuable learning
experience for the much larger Afsluitdijk. When the Afsluitdijk was
finished in 1932, the Zuiderzee was completely dammed off and from
then on would be called lake IJsselmeer. The inflation-adjusted cost
of the dam would be the current equivalent of $710 million.
Read the rest of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuiderzee_Works
Today's selected anniversaries:
1700 At the Battle of Narva King Charles XII of Sweden defeated
the army of Tsar Peter the Great.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Narva)
1789 New Jersey became the first U.S. state to ratify the Bill
of Rights.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights)
1969 Vietnam War: The Cleveland Plain Dealer published explicit
photographs of dead villagers from the My Lai massacre in
Vietnam.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre)
1999 The People's Republic of China launched its first Shenzhou
spacecraft.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhou_spacecraft)
Wikiquote of the day:
"Unless you choose to do great things with it, it makes no
difference how much you are rewarded, or how much power you have."
~ Oprah Winfrey
(http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oprah_Winfrey)
Sir Alfred Hitchcock was a British film director whose films are
closely associated with the suspense thriller genre. Hitchcock is one
of the most well-known and popular directors of all time, known as
the "Master of Suspense" due to the many successful motion pictures
he directed involving murderers and the innocent people caught in
their paths. He directed over fifty films over the course of his
career, with several of them becoming well-known box office hits that
have influenced a great number of filmmakers, producers, and actors.
From 1955 to 1965, Hitchcock was the host and producer of a
long-running television series entitled Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
While his films had made Hitchcock's name synonymous with "suspense,"
the series made Hitchcock a celebrity himself. His voice, image, and
mannerisms became instantly recognizable, and were often the subject
of parody. He directed a few episodes of the series himself, and he
upset a number of movie production companies when he insisted on
using his television crew to produce his motion picture Psycho.
Read the rest of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Hitchcock
Today's selected anniversaries:
1493 Christopher Columbus became the first European to land on
Puerto Rico, an island he named San Juan Bautista.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rico)
1794 The United States and the Kingdom of Great Britain
concluded the Jay Treaty.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Treaty)
1863 U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg
Address.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Address)
1942 Soviet forces under General Georgy Zhukov launched the
Operation Uranus envelopment at the Battle of Stalingrad,
turning the tide of the battle in the Soviet Union's favor.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Uranus)
1977 Egyptian President Anwar Sadat became the first Arab leader
to officially visit Israel; he met with Prime Minister
Menachem Begin and spoke before the Knesset.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_Sadat)
Wikiquote of the day:
"Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation." ~ James Thurber
(http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Thurber)
In mathematics, a regular polytope is a geometric figure with a high
degree of symmetry. Examples in two dimensions include the square,
the regular pentagon and hexagon, and so on. In three dimensions the
regular polytopes include the cube, the dodecahedron, and in fact all
the Platonic solids. There exist examples in higher dimensions also.
Circles and spheres, although highly symmetric, are not considered
regular polytopes because they do not have flat faces. See the
section history of discovery for a more precise definition of regular
polytopes. The strong symmetry of the regular polytopes gives them an
aesthetic quality that piques the interest of non-mathematicians and
mathematicians alike.
Read the rest of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_polytope
Today's selected anniversaries:
1307 William Tell, a legendary marksman in Switzerland,
successfully shot an apple on the head of his son with a
single bolt from his crossbow.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tell)
1905 Prince Carl of Denmark became Haakon VII, the first King of
Norway after the personal union of Sweden-Norway was
dissolved.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haakon_VII_of_Norway)
1959 Ben-Hur, a film based on a bestselling historical novel by
Lew Wallace, premiered in New York City. It went on to win
an unprecedented eleven Academy Awards.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben%2dHur)
1978 Jim Jones led more than 900 members of the People's Temple
to a mass murder/suicide in Jonestown, Guyana.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown)
1985 Calvin and Hobbes, a comic strip by Bill Watterson, was
first published.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_and_Hobbes)
Wikiquote of the day:
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is
striking at the root." ~ Henry David Thoreau
(http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau)
The Battle of Leyte Gulf was a naval battle of the Pacific campaign
of World War II, fought in the seas around the island of Leyte in the
Philippines from October 23 to October 26, 1944. The Japanese
intended to repel or destroy the Allied invasion of Leyte. Instead,
the Allied navies inflicted a major defeat on the outnumbered
Imperial Japanese Navy which finished it as a strategic force in the
Pacific War. The battle is often considered to be the largest naval
battle in history. Leyte Gulf was also the scene of the first use of
kamikaze aircraft by the Japanese. The Australian heavy cruiser HMAS
Australia was hit on 21 October, and organized suicide attacks by the
"Special Attack Force" began on 25 October.
Read the rest of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Leyte_Gulf
Today's selected anniversaries:
1558 Elizabeth I ascended the English Throne.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_I_of_England)
1869 The Suez Canal was inaugurated in an elaborate ceremony.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal)
1969 The SALT I negotiations between the Soviet Union and the
United States began in Helsinki.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SALT_I)
1970 Douglas Engelbart received the patent for the first
computer mouse.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/computer_mouse)
1973 Watergate scandal: In Orlando, Florida, US President
Richard Nixon tells 400 Associated Press managing editors
"I am not a crook."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal)
Wikiquote of the day:
"When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will
know peace." ~ Jimi Hendrix
(http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jimi_Hendrix)
Linus Pauling was an American physical chemist. Widely considered as
the most influential chemist of the 20th century and one of the most
important scientists of all time, Pauling was one of the first
quantum chemists, and in 1954 was awarded the Nobel Prize in
chemistry for his work describing the nature of chemical bonds.
Pauling received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962 for his campaign
against above-ground nuclear testing, becoming one of only two people
to receive the Nobel Prize in more than one field, the other being
Marie Curie.
Read the rest of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling
Today's selected anniversaries:
1854 The Suez Canal was given a royal concession by Said to
commence operation.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Canal)
1889 Deodoro da Fonseca overthrew Emperor Pedro II to become the
first President of the Republic of Brazil.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deodoro_da_Fonseca)
1920 The first general assembly of the League of Nations was
held in Geneva, Switzerland.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Nations)
1971 Intel released the world's first microprocessor, the 4004.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor)
2002 Hu Jintao became General Secretary of the Communist Party
of China.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Jintao)
Wikiquote of the day:
"If I want to understand something, I must observe, I must not
criticize, I must not condemn, I must not pursue it as pleasure or
avoid it as non-pleasure. There must merely be the silent
observation of a fact." ~ J. Krishnamurti
(http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/J._Krishnamurti)