The Buddhas of Bamiyan

The Buddhas of Bamiyan stood for 1500 years, perhaps longer, watching over a beautiful valley of people who revered them not as religious icons but a cultural treasure. Over the many centuries, the giant buddhas, one over 50 meters tall, were hosts to pilgrims and tourists, and merchants traveling the Silk Road, and they welcomed all. In 1996, the government of Afghanistan was usurped by religious fanatics called the Taleban, and they were not so tolerant as the Buddha commended us to be. They believed that all artworks depicting humans or animals were antithetical to their strange sect of Islam, and they began destroying all such works. They worked away at the three Buddhas, firing cannons and mortars, and because these enomous carvings in the living stone of the Bamiyan cliffs were resistant, they brought in experts at demolition. They drilled holes and placed dynamite, and finally, sometime on March 12, 2001, the explosions utterly destroyed the Buddhas. The following picture is of the Global Consciousness Project's 38 eggs' reaction on March 12. I do not know the actual time of the explosion, though I am seeking that information. This graph shows the usual random walk along the horizontal until late morning, UTC. It then exhibits a statistically unlikely trend, which in a formal analysis might be taken as evidence of an effect.

The Buddhas of Bamiyan

The statistical analysis for the full day figure has Chi-square 87051 on 86400 df, and p = 0.059. In the next figure, I have arbitrarily chosen to begin the graph at 10:00 UTC (which was probably about noon in Afghanistan; I think they have a half-hour offset). In this case, the strong trend has a slope equivalent to a probability of 0.00995, based on a Chi-square of 51142 on 50400 degrees of freedom.

The Buddhas of Bamiyan


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