Dec 13, 2014

On This Day - Dec. 13

1937 CE - Imperial Japanese soldiers ransack the city of Nanjing, China. They will murder hundreds of thousands of civilians and commit countless war crimes in what will come to be known as the Rape of Nanking.




Photo of the Day 
Southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius).




In the News



Quote of the Day
"If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization". --Gerald Weinberg




Song of the Day
Artist - Black Sabbath
Album - Black Sabbath




Film of the Day
Director - Richard Pearce




Wiki of the Day 
The slide rule, also known colloquially in the United States as a slipstick,[1] is a mechanical analog computer.[2][3][4][5][6] The slide rule is used primarily for multiplication and division, and also for functions such as rootslogarithms and trigonometry, but is not normally used for addition or subtraction. Though similar in name and appearance to a standard ruler, the slide rule is not ordinarily used for measuring length or drawing straight lines.
Slide rules come in a diverse range of styles and generally appear in a linear or circular form with a standardized set of markings (scales) essential to performing mathematical computations. Slide rules manufactured for specialized fields such as aviation or finance typically feature additional scales that aid in calculations common to that field.
The Reverend William Oughtred and others developed the slide rule in the 17th century based on the emerging work on logarithms by John Napier. Before the advent of the pocket calculator, it was the most commonly used calculation tool in science and engineering. The use of slide rules continued to grow through the 1950s and 1960s even as digital computing devices were being gradually introduced; but around 1974 the electronic scientific calculator made it largely obsolete[7][8][9][10] and most suppliers left the business.


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