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🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Indonesia 🔗 Archaeology

Gunung Padang is a megalithic site located in Karyamukti, Campaka, Cianjur Regency, West Java, Indonesia, 30 kilometres (19 mi) southwest of the regency seat or 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) from Lampegan station. Located at 885 metres (2,904 ft) above sea level, the site covers a hill, an extinct volcano, in a series of five terraces bordered by retaining walls of stone that are accessed by 370 successive andesite steps rising about 95 metres (312 ft). It is covered with massive hexagonal stone columns of volcanic origin. The Sundanese people consider the site sacred and believe it was the result of King Siliwangi's attempt to build a palace in one night.

Gunung Padang consists of a series of five artificial terraces, one rectangular and four trapezoidal, that occur, one through five, at successively higher elevations. These terraces also become sucessively smaller with elevation with the first terrace as the lowest and largest and the fifth terrace as the highest and smallest. These terraces lie along the a central, longitudinal NW-SE axis. They are artificial platforms created by lowering high spots and filling in low spots with fill until a flat surface was achieved. The terrace perimeters consist of perimeter retaining walls formed by volcanic polygonal columns stacked horizontally and posted vertically as posts. This terrace complex is accessed by a central stairway with 370 steps, an inclination of 45 degrees, and a length of 110 m (360 ft).

🔗 Death 🔗 China 🔗 Socialism

The Guangxi Massacre (simplified Chinese: 广西大屠杀; traditional Chinese: 廣西大屠殺; pinyin: Guǎngxī Dàtúshā), or Guangxi Cultural Revolution Massacre (广西文革大屠杀; 廣西文革大屠殺; Guǎngxī Wéngé Dàtúshā), was a series of events involving lynching and direct massacre in Guangxi during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The official record shows an estimated death toll from 100,000 to 150,000. Methods of slaughter included beheading, beating, live burial, stoning, drowning, boiling, disemboweling, and more. In certain areas including Wuxuan County and Wuming District, massive human cannibalism occurred even though no famine existed; according to public records available, at least 137 people—perhaps hundreds more—were eaten by others and at least thousands of people participated in the cannibalism. Other researchers have pointed out that in a county alone, 421 people had been eaten, and there were reports of cannibalism across dozens of counties in Guangxi.

After the Cultural Revolution, people who were involved in the massacre or cannibalism received only minor punishments during the "Boluan Fanzheng" period; in Wuxuan County where at least 38 people were eaten, fourteen participants were prosecuted, receiving up to 14 years in prison, while ninety-one members of the Communist Party of China (CPC) were expelled from the party and thirty-nine non-party officials were either demoted or had a salary cut. Although the cannibalism was sponsored by local offices of Communist Party and militia, no direct evidence suggests that anyone in the national Communist Party leadership including Mao Zedong endorsed the cannibalism or even knew of it.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Greece 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Women's History 🔗 Philosophy/Ancient philosophy

Aristotle's views on women influenced later Western thinkers, as well as Islamic thinkers, who quoted him as an authority until the end of the Middle Ages, influencing women's history.

In his Politics, Aristotle saw women as subject to men, but as higher than slaves, and lacking authority; he believed the husband should exert political rule over the wife. Among women's differences from men were that they were, in his view, more impulsive, more compassionate, more complaining, and more deceptive. He gave the same weight to women's happiness as to men's, and in his Rhetoric stated that society could not be happy unless women were happy too. Whereas Plato was open to the potential equality of men and women, stating both that women were not equal to men in terms of strength and virtue, but were equal to men in terms of rational and occupational capacity, and hence in the ideal Republic should be educated and allowed to work alongside men without differentiation, Aristotle appears to have disagreed.

In his theory of inheritance, Aristotle considered the mother to provide a passive material element to the child, while the father provided an active, ensouling element with the form of the human species.

🔗 Computing

The Fletcher checksum is an algorithm for computing a position-dependent checksum devised by John G. Fletcher (1934–2012) at Lawrence Livermore Labs in the late 1970s. The objective of the Fletcher checksum was to provide error-detection properties approaching those of a cyclic redundancy check but with the lower computational effort associated with summation techniques.

🔗 Mathematics

Langton's ant is a two-dimensional universal Turing machine with a very simple set of rules but complex emergent behavior. It was invented by Chris Langton in 1986 and runs on a square lattice of black and white cells. The universality of Langton's ant was proven in 2000. The idea has been generalized in several different ways, such as turmites which add more colors and more states.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Korea 🔗 Correction and Detention Facilities 🔗 Korea/North Korea

Hwasong concentration camp (Chosŏn'gŭl: 화성 제16호 관리소, also spelled Hwasŏng or Hwaseong) is a labor camp in North Korea for political prisoners. The official name is Kwan-li-so (Penal-labor colony) No. 16.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Birds

A chicken can be hypnotized, or put into a trance, by holding its head down against the ground, and drawing a line along the ground with a stick or a finger, starting at the beak and extending straight outward in front of the chicken. If the chicken is hypnotized in this manner, it will continue to stare at the line, remaining immobile for as long as 30 minutes. Other methods of inducing this state are also known. Ethologists refer to this state as 'tonic immobility' i.e. a natural state of semi-paralysis that some animals enter when presented with a threat, which is probably a defensive mechanism intended to feign death, albeit rather poorly.

The first known written reference for this method came in 1646, in Mirabele Experimentum de Imaginatione Gallinae by Athanasius Kircher in Rome.

🔗 United States 🔗 Economics 🔗 Politics

American decline is a term used by various analysts to describe the diminishing power of the United States geopolitically, militarily, financially, economically, socially, and in health and the environment. There has been a debate between declinists, those who believe America is in decline, and exceptionalists, those who feel America is immortal.

Some analysts say that the U.S. was in decline long before Donald Trump ran for presidency; becoming the first presidential candidate to promote the idea that the U.S. was in decline. While others suggest the decline either stems from or has accelerated with Trump's foreign policy and the "country’s ongoing withdrawal from the global arena." According to Noam Chomsky, America's decline started at the end of WWII, dismissing the "remarkable rhetoric of the several years of triumphalism in the 1990s" as "mostly self-delusion".

Gallup's pollsters recently reported that worldwide approval of U.S. leadership has plunged from 48% in 2016 to a record low of 30% in 2018, in part due to the increasingly isolationist stances of Donald Trump. This drop places the U.S. a notch below China's 31% and leaving Germany as the most popular power with an approval of 41%. Michael Hudson describes financial pillar as paramount, resulting from bank-created money with compound interest and the inbuilt refusal to forgive debts as the fatal flaw.

China's challenging the U.S. for global predominance constitutes the core issue in the debate over the American decline.