Angkor Wat is a temple at Angkor, Cambodia, built in the capital city for King Suryavarman II in the early 12th century as the state temple. The largest and best-preserved temple at the site, it is the only one to have remained a significant religious center—first Hindu, then Buddhist—since its foundation. The temple is the epitome of the high classical style of Khmer architecture. It has become a symbol of Cambodia, appearing on its national flag, and is the country's prime attraction for visitors. Angkor Wat combines two basic plans of Khmer temple architecture: the temple mountain and the later galleried temple. It is designed to represent Mount Meru, home of the gods in Hindu mythology. At the center of the temple stands a quincunx of towers. The temple is admired for the grandeur and harmony of its architecture and for the extensive bas-reliefs and the numerous devatas adorning its walls. Unusually, Angkor Wat faces the west; scholars are divided as to the significance of this.
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angkor_Wat
_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1743:
French physicist Jean-Pierre Christin published the design of a mercury thermometer using the centigrade scale, with 0 representing the melting point of water and 100 its boiling point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius
1911:
Parks Canada, the world's first national park service, was established as the Dominion Parks Branch under the Department of the Interior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parks_Canada
1991:
Breakup of Yugoslavia: With the local Serb population boycotting the referendum, Croatians voted in favour of independence from Yugoslavia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Croatian_independence_referendum
2018:
The wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle (both pictured) took place at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle, England. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedding_of_Prince_Harry_and_Meghan_Markle
_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:
gnomon: 1. An object such as a pillar or a rod that is used to tell time by the shadow it casts when the sun shines on it, especially the pointer on a sundial. 2. An object such as a pillar used by an observer to calculate the meridian altitude of the sun (that is, the altitude of the sun when it reaches the observer's meridian), for the purpose of determining the observer's latitude. 3. The index of the hour circle of a globe. 4. (geometry) A plane figure formed by removing a parallelogram from a corner of a larger parallelogram. 5. (mathematics, by extension) A number representing the increment between two figurate numbers (“numbers equal to the numbers of dots in geometric figures formed of dots”). https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gnomon
___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:
Design is really a special case of problem solving. One wants to bring about a desired state of affairs. Occasionally one wants to remedy some fault but more usually one wants to bring about something new. For that reason design is more open ended than problem solving. It requires more creativity. It is not so much a matter of linking up a clearly defined objective with a clearly defined starting position (as in problem solving) but more a matter of starting out from a general position in the direction of a general objective. --Edward de Bono https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edward_de_Bono