Wikipedia:Main Page history/2016 November 2

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Female mayfly

Mayflies are an order (Ephemeroptera) of over 3,000 species of flying insects, related to dragonflies and damselflies. They are relatively primitive, with ancestral traits that were probably present in the first flying insects, such as long tails, and wings that do not fold flat over the abdomen. Their immature stages (nymphs) live in fresh water. Unique among insect orders, they have a fully winged adult stage that moults into a sexually mature adult. Often, all the mayflies in a population mature at the same time, emerging in the spring, summer or autumn in enormous numbers; some hatchings attract tourists. Mayflies are a favourite food of many fish, and fishing flies are often modelled to resemble them. The brief lives of mayfly adults—less than five minutes for the female Dolania americana, after the final moult—have been noted by naturalists and encyclopaedists since Aristotle and Pliny the Elder. The English poet George Crabbe compared a daily newspaper's lifespan to that of a mayfly in the satirical poem "The Newspaper" (1785). (Full article...)

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Taiwan whistling thrush
Taiwan whistling thrush

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Brandon Laird in April 2016
Brandon Laird

On this day...

November 2: All Souls' Day (Western Christianity); Day of the Dead in Mexico

Theo van Gogh
Theo van Gogh
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Robinson projection

The Robinson projection is a map projection of a world map which shows the entire world at once. It was devised by Arthur H. Robinson in 1963 in response to an appeal from the Rand McNally company for a good compromise to the problem of readily showing the whole globe as a flat image. The company has used the projection since that time, and the National Geographic Society used the Robinson from 1988 to 1998.

Map: Strebe, using Geocart

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