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🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Wiltshire

The Stonehenge Archer is the name given to a Bronze Age man whose body was discovered in the outer ditch of Stonehenge. Unlike most burials in the Stonehenge Landscape, his body was not in a barrow, although it did appear to have been deliberately and carefully buried in the ditch.

Examination of the skeleton indicated that the man was local to the area and aged about 30 when he died. Radiocarbon dating suggests that he died around 2300 BCE, making his death roughly contemporary with the Amesbury Archer and the Boscombe Bowmen buried 3 miles away in Amesbury.

He came to be known as an archer because of the stone wrist-guard and a number of flint arrowheads buried with him. In fact, several of the arrowheads' tips were located in the skeleton's bones, suggesting that the man had been killed by them.

His body was excavated in 1978 by Richard Atkinson and John G. Evans who had been re-examining an older trench in the ditch and bank of Stonehenge. His remains are now housed in the Salisbury Museum in Salisbury.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Transhumanism

Neuromancer is a 1984 science fiction novel by American-Canadian writer William Gibson. Considered one of the earliest and best-known works in the cyberpunk genre, it is the only novel to win the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It was Gibson's debut novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy. Set in the future, the novel follows Henry Case, a washed-up hacker hired for one last job, which brings him in contact with a powerful artificial intelligence.

🔗 Environment 🔗 Energy

Pumped-storage hydroelectricity (PSH), or pumped hydroelectric energy storage (PHES), is a type of hydroelectric energy storage used by electric power systems for load balancing. The method stores energy in the form of gravitational potential energy of water, pumped from a lower elevation reservoir to a higher elevation. Low-cost surplus off-peak electric power is typically used to run the pumps. During periods of high electrical demand, the stored water is released through turbines to produce electric power.

Pumped-storage hydroelectricity allows energy from intermittent sources (such as solar, wind) and other renewables, or excess electricity from continuous base-load sources (such as coal or nuclear) to be saved for periods of higher demand. The reservoirs used with pumped storage can be quite small when contrasted with the lakes of conventional hydroelectric plants of similar power capacity, and generating periods are often less than half a day.

The round-trip efficiency of PSH generally varies between 70%–80%. Although the losses of the pumping process make the plant a net consumer of energy overall, the system increases revenue by selling more electricity during periods of peak demand, when electricity prices are highest. If the upper lake collects significant rainfall or is fed by a river then the plant may be a net energy producer in the manner of a traditional hydroelectric plant.

Pumped storage is by far the largest-capacity form of grid energy storage available, and, as of 2020, PSH accounts for around 95% of all active storage installations worldwide, with a total installed throughput capacity of over 181 GW and a total installed storage capacity of over 1.6 TWh.

The main requirement for PSH is hilly country. The global greenfield pumped hydro atlas lists more than 600,000 potential sites around the world, which is about 100 times more than needed to support 100% renewable electricity. Most are closed-loop systems away from rivers. Areas of natural beauty and new dams on rivers can be avoided because of the very large number of potential sites. Some projects utilise existing reservoirs (dubbed "bluefield") such as the 350 Gigawatt-hour Snowy 2.0 scheme under construction in Australia. Some recently proposed projects propose to take advantage of "brownfield" locations such as disused mines such as the Kidston project under construction in Australia.

Water requirements for PSH are small: about 1 gigalitre of initial fill water per gigawatt-hour of storage. This water is recycled uphill and back downhill between the two reservoirs for many decades, but evaporation losses (beyond what rainfall and any inflow from local waterways provide) must be replaced. Land requirements are also small: about 10 hectares per gigawatt-hour of storage, which is much smaller than the land occupied by the solar and windfarms that the storage might support. Closed loop (off-river) pumped hydro storage has the smallest carbon emissions per unit of storage of all candidates for large-scale energy storage.

🔗 Religion 🔗 Visual arts 🔗 Buddhism 🔗 Asia

The Greco-Buddhist art or Gandhara art is the artistic manifestation of Greco-Buddhism, a cultural syncretism between Ancient Greek art and Buddhism. It had mainly evolved in the ancient region of Gandhara, located in the northwestern fringe of the Indian subcontinent.

The series of interactions leading to Gandhara art occurred over time, beginning with Alexander the Great's brief incursion into the area, followed by the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka converting the region to Buddhism. Buddhism became the prominent religion in the Indo-Greek Kingdoms. However, Greco-Buddhist art truly flowered and spread under the Kushan Empire, when the first surviving devotional images of the Buddha were created during the 1st-3rd centuries CE. Gandhara art reached its zenith from the 3rd-5th century CE, when most surviving motifs and artworks were produced.

Gandhara art is characterized by Buddhist subject matter, sometimes adapting Greco-Roman elements, rendered in a style and forms that are heavily influenced by Greco-Roman art. It has the strong idealistic realism and sensuous description of Hellenistic art, and it is believed to have produced the first representations of Gautama Buddha in human form, ending the early period of aniconism in Buddhism.

The representation of the human form in large sculpture had a considerable influence, both to the south in the rest of India, and to the east, where the spread of Buddhism carried its influence as far as Japan.

🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Film 🔗 Germany 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 Film/German cinema

The Lives of Others (German: Das Leben der Anderen, pronounced [das ˈleːbm̩ deːɐ̯ ˈʔandəʁən] ) is a 2006 German drama film written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck marking his feature film directorial debut. The plot is about the monitoring of East Berlin residents by agents of the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. It stars Ulrich Mühe as Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler, Ulrich Tukur as his superior Anton Grubitz, Sebastian Koch as the playwright Georg Dreyman, and Martina Gedeck as Dreyman's lover, a prominent actress named Christa-Maria Sieland.

The film was released by Buena Vista International in Germany on 23 March 2006. At the same time, the screenplay was published by Suhrkamp Verlag. The Lives of Others won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. The film had earlier won seven Deutscher Filmpreis awards—including those for best film, best director, best screenplay, best actor, and best supporting actor—after setting a new record with 11 nominations. It also won the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language and European Film Award for Best Film, while it was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The Lives of Others cost US$2 million and grossed more than US$77 million worldwide.

Released 17 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, marking the end of the German Democratic Republic, it was the first notable drama film about the subject after a series of comedies such as Good Bye, Lenin! and Sonnenallee. This approach was widely applauded in Germany, and the film was complimented for its accurate tone despite some criticism that Wiesler's character was depicted unrealistically and with undue sympathy. The film's authenticity was considered praiseworthy given that the director grew up outside of East Germany and was 16 when the Berlin Wall fell.

🔗 Philately 🔗 Netherlands

A postzegelcode is a hand-written method of franking in the Netherlands. It consists of a code containing nine numbers and letters that customers can purchase online from PostNL and write directly on their piece of mail within five days as proof-of-payment in place of a postage stamp.

For mail within the Netherlands the nine letters and numbers are written as a grid of 3x3. For international mail there is fourth additional row that contains P, N, L.

The system was started in 2013. Initially the postzegelcode was more expensive than a stamp because additional handling systems were required. Then for a while the postzegelcode was cheaper. Eventually the tariffs were set to the same price.

In December 2020, 590,000 people sent cards with postzegelcodes.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Computing 🔗 Women scientists 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Women's History

Klára Dán von Neumann (born Klára Dán; 18 August 1911 – 10 November 1963) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, self-taught engineer and computer scientist, noted as one of the first computer programmers. She was the first woman to execute modern-style code on a computer. Klára made significant contributions to the world of programming, including work on the Monte Carlo method, ENIAC, and MANIAC I.

🔗 Books

The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't is a book by Stanford professor Robert I. Sutton. He initially wrote an essay for the Harvard Business Review, published in the breakthrough ideas for 2004. Following the essay, he received more than one thousand emails and testimonies. Among other reasons disclosed in another article published at the Harvard Business Review, these letters led him to write the book, sell more than 115,000 copies, and win the Quill Award for best business book in 2007.

The theme of this book is that workplace bullying worsens morale and productivity. To screen out the toxic staff, it suggests the "no asshole rule". The author insists upon use of the word asshole since other words such as bully or jerk "do not convey the same degree of awfulness". In terms of using the word in the book's title, he said "There's an emotional reaction to a dirty title. You have a choice between being offensive and being ignored."

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics

The Gompertz curve or Gompertz function is a type of mathematical model for a time series, named after Benjamin Gompertz (1779–1865). It is a sigmoid function which describes growth as being slowest at the start and end of a given time period. The right-side or future value asymptote of the function is approached much more gradually by the curve than the left-side or lower valued asymptote. This is in contrast to the simple logistic function in which both asymptotes are approached by the curve symmetrically. It is a special case of the generalised logistic function. The function was originally designed to describe human mortality, but since has been modified to be applied in biology, with regard to detailing populations.

🔗 China 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Writing systems

Biangbiang noodles (simplified Chinese: 𰻝𰻝面; traditional Chinese: 𰻞𰻞麵; pinyin: Biángbiángmiàn), alternatively known as youpo chemian (simplified Chinese: 油泼扯面; traditional Chinese: 油潑扯麵) in Chinese, are a type of Chinese noodle originating from Shaanxi cuisine. The noodles, touted as one of the "eight curiosities" of Shaanxi (陕西八大怪), are described as being like a belt, owing to their thickness and length.

Biangbiang noodles are renowned for being written using a unique character. The character is unusually complex, with the standard variant of its traditional form containing 58 strokes.