Wikipedia:Main Page history/2015 August 19

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The hermeneutic style of Latin, a style with many unusual and arcane words, especially from Greek, became the nearly universal preference in tenth-century England. It was first found in the work of Apuleius in the second century and then in Europe in the later Roman period. In the early medieval period some leading Continental scholars were exponents, including Johannes Scotus Eriugena and Odo of Cluny; the most influential hermeneutic writer was the English seventh-century bishop Aldhelm. In England the hermeneutic style became increasingly influential in the tenth century when Latin scholarship was reviving; in continental Europe, the style was only ever used by a minority of writers. It was the house style of the English Benedictine Reform, the most important intellectual movement in later Anglo-Saxon England. The style fell out of favour after the Norman Conquest, and the twelfth-century chronicler William of Malmesbury described it as disgusting and bombastic. Historians were equally dismissive until the late twentieth century, when scholars such as Michael Lapidge argued that it should be taken seriously as an important aspect of late Anglo-Saxon culture. (Full article...)

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New Town Hall in Hanover

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In the news

Jason Day

A bomb explosion in Bangkok, Thailand, kills at least 23 people and injures more than 120 others.
In golf, Jason Day (pictured) wins the PGA Championship.
The Netball World Cup concludes with Australia defeating New Zealand in the final.
Trigana Air Service Flight 257 crashes in Papua, Indonesia, killing all 54 passengers and crew on board.
Mathematicians at the University of Washington Bothell discover a new type of pentagon tiling, the first new way to "tile the plane" with a single polygon since 1985.
Flooding in Myanmar kills at least 100 people and affects more than a million others.

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- Julian Bond

On this day...

August 19: Feast of the Transfiguration (Julian calendar)

Ho Chi Minh

295 BC – The oldest known temple to Venus, the Roman goddess of love, beauty and fertility, was dedicated.
1895 – American outlaw and folk hero John Wesley Hardin was shot dead by an off-duty lawman in El Paso, Texas.
1945 – During the August Revolution against French colonial rule, the Viet Minh under Ho Chi Minh (pictured) took control of Hanoi in northern Vietnam.
1989 – Hungary opened its border with Austria as part of the Pan-European Picnic, allowing several hundred East Germans to defect to the West.
2005 – Thunderstorms in southern Ontario, Canada, spawned at least three tornadoes that caused over C$500 million in damage.

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Today's featured picture

The Craig retroazimuthal is a modified cylindrical map projection created by James Ireland Craig in 1909. It preserves the direction from any place to one other, predetermined place while avoiding some of the distortion of the Hammer retroazimuthal projection. This projection is sometimes known as the Mecca projection because Craig, who had worked in Egypt as a cartographer, created it to help Muslims find the qibla.

Map: Strebe, using Geocart

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