To stay up to date you can also follow on Mastodon.

🔗 Religion 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Greece 🔗 India 🔗 Pakistan 🔗 Buddhism 🔗 India/Indian history workgroup 🔗 Pakistan/Pakistani history

Greco-Buddhism, or Graeco-Buddhism, is the cultural syncretism between Hellenistic culture and Buddhism, which developed between the 4th century BC and the 5th century AD in Gandhara, in present-day north-western Pakistan and parts of north-east Afghanistan.

It was a cultural consequence of a long chain of interactions begun by Greek forays into the Indian subcontinent from the time of Alexander the Great. A few years after Alexander's death, the Easternmost fringes of the empire of his general Seleucus were lost in a war with the Mauryan Empire, under the reign of Chandragupta Maurya. The Mauryan Emperor Ashoka would convert to Buddhism and spread the religious philosophy throughout his domain, as recorded in the Edicts of Ashoka. This spread to the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, which itself seceded from the Seleucid empire. Within its borders, the Greek fondness for statuary produced the first statues of the Buddha, leading ultimately to the modern tradition.

Following the collapse of the Mauryan Empire, Greco-Buddhism continued to flourish under the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, Indo-Greek Kingdoms, and Kushan Empire. Mahayana Buddhism was spread from the Gangetic plains in India into Gandhara and then Central Asia during the Mauryan Era, where it became the most prevalent branch of Buddhism in Central Asia. Mahayana Buddhism was later transmitted through the Silk Road into the Han Dynasty during the Kushan era under the reign of Emperor Kanishka. Buddhist tradition details the monk, Majjhantika of Varanasi, was made responsible for spreading Buddhism in the region by Emperor Ashoka.

🔗 Biology 🔗 Palaeontology 🔗 Geology

The Boring Billion, otherwise known as the Mid Proterozoic and Earth's Middle Ages, is the time period between 1.8 and 0.8 billion years ago (Ga) spanning the middle Proterozoic eon, characterized by more or less tectonic stability, climatic stasis, and slow biological evolution. It is bordered by two different oxygenation and glacial events, but the Boring Billion itself had very low oxygen levels and no evidence of glaciation.

The oceans may have been oxygen- and nutrient-poor and sulfidic (euxinia), populated by mainly anoxygenic purple bacteria, a type of chlorophyll-based photosynthetic bacteria which uses hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) instead of water and produces sulfur instead of oxygen. This is known as a Canfield ocean. Such composition may have caused the oceans to be black- and milky-turquoise instead of blue. (By contrast, during the much earlier Purple Earth phase the photosynthesis was retinal-based.)

Despite such adverse conditions, eukaryotes may have evolved around the beginning of the Boring Billion, and adopted several novel adaptations, such as various organelles, multicellularity, and possibly sexual reproduction, and diversified into plants, animals, and fungi at the end of this time interval. Such advances may have been important precursors to the evolution of large, complex life later in the Ediacaran and Phanerozoic. Nonetheless, prokaryotic cyanobacteria were the dominant lifeforms during this time, and likely supported an energy-poor food-web with a small number of protists at the apex level. The land was likely inhabited by prokaryotic cyanobacteria and eukaryotic proto-lichens, the latter more successful here probably due to the greater availability of nutrients than in offshore ocean waters.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Law

The Brussels effect is the process of unilateral regulatory globalisation caused by the European Union de facto (but not necessarily de jure) externalising its laws outside its borders through market mechanisms.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

The Pentium FDIV bug is a hardware bug affecting the floating-point unit (FPU) of the early Intel Pentium processors. Because of the bug, the processor would return incorrect binary floating point results when dividing certain pairs of high-precision numbers. The bug was discovered in 1994 by Thomas R. Nicely, a professor of mathematics at Lynchburg College. Missing values in a lookup table used by the FPU's floating-point division algorithm led to calculations acquiring small errors. While these errors would in most use-cases only occur rarely and result in small deviations from the correct output values, in certain circumstances the errors can occur frequently and lead to more significant deviations.

The severity of the FDIV bug is debated. Though rarely encountered by most users (Byte magazine estimated that 1 in 9 billion floating point divides with random parameters would produce inaccurate results), both the flaw and Intel's initial handling of the matter were heavily criticized by the tech community.

In December 1994, Intel recalled the defective processors in what was the first full recall of a computer chip. In its 1994 annual report, Intel said it incurred "a $475 million pre-tax charge ... to recover replacement and write-off of these microprocessors."

🔗 Comics

"Cow tools" is a cartoon from The Far Side by American cartoonist Gary Larson, published in October 1982. It depicts a cow standing behind a table of bizarre, misshapen implements with the caption "cow tools". The cartoon confused many readers, who wrote or phoned in seeking an explanation of the joke. In response to the controversy, Larson issued a press release clarifying that the thrust of the cartoon was simply that, if a cow were to make tools, they would "lack something in sophistication". It has been described as "arguably the most loathed Far Side strip ever" while also becoming a popular internet meme.

🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Ancient Egypt 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Ethnic groups 🔗 Israel 🔗 Palestine 🔗 Dacia

The Sea Peoples are a purported seafaring confederation that attacked ancient Egypt and other regions of the East Mediterranean prior to and during the Late Bronze Age collapse (1200–900 BCE). Following the creation of the concept in the nineteenth century, it became one of the most famous chapters of Egyptian history, given its connection with, in the words of Wilhelm Max Müller: "the most important questions of ethnography and the primitive history of classic nations". Their origins undocumented, the various Sea Peoples have been proposed to have originated from places that include western Asia Minor, the Aegean, the Mediterranean islands and Southern Europe. Although the archaeological inscriptions do not include reference to a migration, the Sea Peoples are conjectured to have sailed around the eastern Mediterranean and invaded Anatolia, Syria, Phoenicia, Canaan, Cyprus and Egypt toward the end of the Bronze Age.

French Egyptologist Emmanuel de Rougé first used the term peuples de la mer (literally "peoples of the sea") in 1855 in a description of reliefs on the Second Pylon at Medinet Habu documenting Year 8 of Ramesses III. Gaston Maspero, de Rougé's successor at the Collège de France, subsequently popularized the term "Sea Peoples" — and an associated migration-theory — in the late 19th century. Since the early 1990s, his migration theory has been brought into question by a number of scholars.

The Sea Peoples remain unidentified in the eyes of most modern scholars and hypotheses regarding the origin of the various groups are the source of much speculation. Existing theories variously propose equating them with several Aegean tribes, raiders from Central Europe, scattered soldiers who turned to piracy or who had become refugees, and links with natural disasters such as earthquakes or climatic shifts.

🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 Psychology

In the Abilene paradox, a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that is counter to the preferences of many or all of the individuals in the group. It involves a common breakdown of group communication in which each member mistakenly believes that their own preferences are counter to the group's and, therefore, does not raise objections. A common phrase relating to the Abilene paradox is a desire not to "rock the boat". This differs from groupthink in that the Abilene paradox is characterized by an inability to manage agreement.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Chemicals 🔗 Occupational Safety and Health 🔗 Military history/World War I 🔗 Medicine/Toxicology

Chloropicrin, also known as PS and nitrochloroform, is a chemical compound currently used as a broad-spectrum antimicrobial, fungicide, herbicide, insecticide, and nematicide. It was used as a poison gas in World War I. Its chemical structural formula is Cl₃CNO₂.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Military history/German military history 🔗 Firearms 🔗 Military history/European military history

The Heckler & Koch P11 is an underwater firearm developed in 1976 by Heckler & Koch. It has five barrels and each fires a 7.62×36mm dart electrically. Loading is by means of a five-round case. The design resembles that of a pepper-box firearm.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 History 🔗 Russia/sports and games in Russia 🔗 Gymnastics

The Korbut flip is a gymnastics skill performed on either of two different apparatus. Both were first performed internationally by the Soviet gymnast Olga Korbut.

The more spectacular version of the skill used to be performed on the uneven bars, where the gymnast, from a stand on the high bar, performs a back flip and regrasps the bar. Korbut performed the move at the 1972 Summer Olympics, where it was the first backward release move performed on the uneven bars in international competition. In 1977, Soviet gymnast Elena Mukhina modified the flip by adding a full twist. The movement was later modified in the 1980s when it was performed towards the low bar; that is, the gymnast's flip takes place above the low bar. The Code of Points was later modified to ban standing on the high bar during routines.

The skill is also performed on the balance beam. The move is performed from a standing position and is landed in a straddled position on the beam. This movement has been modified to include twists and piked or tucked legs and is frequently performed in sequence with other movements. Unlike its counterpart on the uneven bars, the Korbut flip on beam is today considered a relatively simple skill, valued at only a "B" level in the 2017 Code of Points.

Other gymnasts who have performed the skill's uneven bars variation include Radka Zemanova (1980), Steffi Kraker (1977), Emily May (1981), Lyubov Bogdanova (1974) and Natalia Shaposhnikova (1976).