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>
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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>
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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>
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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>