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Sky Lanterns
A sky lantern (), also known as Kǒngmíng lantern (), or Chinese lantern, is a small hot air balloon made of paper, with an opening at the bottom where a small fire is suspended. In Asia and elsewhere around the world, sky lanterns have been traditionally made for centuries, to be launched for play or as part of long-established festivities. The name ''sky lantern'' is a translation of the Chinese name but they have also been referred to as ''sky candles'' or ''fire balloons''. In Thai, they are known as ''khom loi''. Several fires have been attributed to sky lanterns, with at least one 21st-century death caused. Sky lanterns have been made illegal in several countries. Many areas of Asia do not permit sky lanterns because of widespread fire hazards as well as danger to livestock. Construction The general design is a thin paper shell, which may be from about 30 cm to a couple of metres across, with an opening at the bottom. The opening is usually about 10 to 30 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mexico
Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and to the east by the Gulf of Mexico. Mexico covers ,Mexico ''''. . making it the world's 13th-largest country by are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Zhuge Liang
Zhuge Liang ( zh, t=諸葛亮 / 诸葛亮) (181 – September 234), courtesy name Kongming, was a Chinese statesman and military strategist. He was chancellor and later regent of the state of Shu Han during the Three Kingdoms period. He is recognised as the most accomplished strategist of his era, and has been compared to Sun Tzu, the author of '' The Art of War''. His reputation as an intelligent and learned scholar grew even while he was living in relative seclusion, earning him the nickname "Wolong" or "Fulong", meaning "Crouching Dragon" or "Sleeping Dragon". Zhuge Liang is often depicted wearing a Taoist robe and holding a hand fan made of crane feathers. Zhuge Liang was a Confucian-oriented "Legalist". He liked to compare himself to the sage minister Guan Zhong and Yue Yi developing Shu's agriculture and industry to become a regional power, and attached great importance to the works of Shen Buhai and Han Fei, refusing to indulge local elites and adopting strict ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
3rd Century BC
In the Mediterranean Basin, the first few decades of this century were characterized by a balance of power between the Greek Hellenistic kingdoms in the east, and the great mercantile power of Carthage in the west. This balance was shattered when conflict arose between ancient Carthage and the Roman Republic. In the following decades, the Carthaginian Republic was first humbled and then destroyed by the Romans in the First and Second Punic Wars. Following the Second Punic War, Rome became the most important power in the western Mediterranean. In the eastern Mediterranean, the Seleucid Empire and Ptolemaic Kingdom, successor states to the empire of Alexander the Great, fought a series of Syrian Wars for control over the Levant. In mainland Greece, the short-lived Antipatrid dynasty of Macedon was overthrown and replaced by the Antigonid dynasty in 294 BC, a royal house that would dominate the affairs of Hellenistic Greece for roughly a century until the stalemate of the Fir ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joseph Needham
Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham (; 9 December 1900 – 24 March 1995) was a British biochemist, historian of science and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science and technology, initiating publication of the multivolume '' Science and Civilisation in China''. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1941 and a fellow of the British Academy in 1971. In 1992, Queen Elizabeth II conferred on him the Companionship of Honour, and the Royal Society noted he was the only living person to hold these three titles. Early life Needham's father, Joseph was a doctor, and his mother, Alicia Adelaïde, née Montgomery (1863–1945), was a music composer from Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland. His father, born in East London, then a poor section of town, rose to became a Harley Street physician, but frequently battled with Needham's mother. The young Needham often mediated. In his early teens, he was taken to hear the Su ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Historian Of Science
The history of science covers the development of science from ancient times to the present. It encompasses all three major branches of science: natural, social, and formal. Science's earliest roots can be traced to Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia around 3000 to 1200 BCE. These civilizations' contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine influenced later Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, wherein formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Latin-speaking Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages, but continued to thrive in the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire. Aided by translations of Greek texts, the Hellenistic worldview was preserved and absorbed into the Arabic-speaking Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age. The recovery and a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sinologist
Sinology, or Chinese studies, is an academic discipline that focuses on the study of China primarily through Chinese philosophy, language, literature, culture and history and often refers to Western scholarship. Its origin "may be traced to the examination which Chinese scholars made of their own civilization." The field of sinology was historically seen to be equivalent to the application of philology to China and until the 20th century was generally seen as meaning "Chinese philology" (language and literature). Sinology has broadened in modern times to include Chinese history, epigraphy and other subjects. Terminology The terms "sinology" and "sinologist" were coined around 1838 and use "sino-", derived from Late Latin ''Sinae'' from the Greek ''Sinae'', from the Arabic ''Sin'' which in turn may derive from ''Qin'', as in the Qin dynasty. In the context of area studies, the European and the American usages may differ. In Europe, Sinology is usually known as ''Chinese Studies' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rosin
Rosin (), also called colophony or Greek pitch ( la, links=no, pix graeca), is a solid form of resin obtained from pines and some other plants, mostly conifers, produced by heating fresh liquid resin to vaporize the volatile liquid terpene components. It is semi-transparent and varies in color from yellow to black. At room temperature rosin is brittle, but it melts at stove-top temperature. It chiefly consists of various resin acids, especially abietic acid. The term ''colophony'' comes from , Latin for "resin from Colophon" ( grc, Κολοφωνία ῥητίνη, Kolophōnia rhētinē), an ancient Ionic city. Properties Rosin is brittle and friable, with a faint piny odor. It is typically a glassy solid, though some rosins will form crystals, especially when brought into solution. The practical melting point varies with different specimens, some being semi-fluid at the temperature of boiling water, others melting at 100 °C to 120 °C. It is very flammable, burn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paraffin Wax
Paraffin wax (or petroleum wax) is a soft colorless solid derived from petroleum, coal, or oil shale that consists of a mixture of hydrocarbon molecules containing between 20 and 40 carbon atoms. It is solid at room temperature and begins to melt above approximately , and its boiling point is above . Common applications for paraffin wax include lubrication, electrical insulation, and candles; dyed paraffin wax can be made into crayons. It is distinct from kerosene and other petroleum products that are sometimes called paraffin. Un-dyed, unscented paraffin candles are odorless and bluish-white. Paraffin wax was first created by Carl Reichenbach in Germany in 1830 and marked a major advancement in candlemaking technology, as it burned more cleanly and reliably than tallow candles and was cheaper to produce. In chemistry, ''paraffin'' is used synonymously with '' alkane'', indicating hydrocarbons with the general formula C''n''H2''n''+2. The name is derived from Latin ''par ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prism (geometry)
In geometry, a prism is a polyhedron comprising an polygon base, a second base which is a translated copy (rigidly moved without rotation) of the first, and other faces, necessarily all parallelograms, joining corresponding sides of the two bases. All cross-sections parallel to the bases are translations of the bases. Prisms are named after their bases, e.g. a prism with a pentagonal base is called a pentagonal prism. Prisms are a subclass of prismatoids. Like many basic geometric terms, the word ''prism'' () was first used in Euclid's Elements. Euclid defined the term in Book XI as “a solid figure contained by two opposite, equal and parallel planes, while the rest are parallelograms”. However, this definition has been criticized for not being specific enough in relation to the nature of the bases, which caused confusion among later geometry writers. Oblique prism An oblique prism is a prism in which the joining edges and faces are ''not perpendicular'' to the base ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cube
In geometry, a cube is a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex. Viewed from a corner it is a hexagon and its net is usually depicted as a cross. The cube is the only regular hexahedron and is one of the five Platonic solids. It has 6 faces, 12 edges, and 8 vertices. The cube is also a square parallelepiped, an equilateral cuboid and a right rhombohedron a 3-zonohedron. It is a regular square prism in three orientations, and a trigonal trapezohedron in four orientations. The cube is dual to the octahedron. It has cubical or octahedral symmetry. The cube is the only convex polyhedron whose faces are all squares. Orthogonal projections The ''cube'' has four special orthogonal projections, centered, on a vertex, edges, face and normal to its vertex figure. The first and third correspond to the A2 and B2 Coxeter planes. Spherical tiling The cube can also be represented as a spherical tiling, and p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Octahedron
In geometry, an octahedron (plural: octahedra, octahedrons) is a polyhedron with eight faces. The term is most commonly used to refer to the regular octahedron, a Platonic solid composed of eight equilateral triangles, four of which meet at each vertex. A regular octahedron is the dual polyhedron of a cube. It is a rectified tetrahedron. It is a square bipyramid in any of three orthogonal orientations. It is also a triangular antiprism in any of four orientations. An octahedron is the three-dimensional case of the more general concept of a cross polytope. A regular octahedron is a 3-ball in the Manhattan () metric. Regular octahedron Dimensions If the edge length of a regular octahedron is ''a'', the radius of a circumscribed sphere (one that touches the octahedron at all vertices) is :r_u = \frac a \approx 0.707 \cdot a and the radius of an inscribed sphere (tangent to each of the octahedron's faces) is :r_i = \frac a \approx 0.408\cdot a while the midradius, which t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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