Saturday Afternoon Tweets: Dead Chinese Pedestrians

It has been a zany day of news events both here in America, as well as around the globe, as evident from these ten tweets (not all of them are about news items):

1) Male Thoughts: And yet another day I've gone without using calculus (top image)

2) Because I'm a Guy: It can take me anywhere between 0.02 seconds to 3 days to reply to a text.

3) Patrick Radden Keefe (bottom image): Astonishing story. Look both ways indeed: Why drivers in China intentionally kill pedestrians they hit.

4) Anne Applebaum: Europe turned away from crises in Libya and Syria. But now the results have arrived on their shores (center image: Both Turkey and Greece have received influx of refugees en route to western Europe).

5) John McCain: Must-read WSJ-Opinion: Beijing's Martial Display_ China puts on a show of military power and nationalism.

6) Bridget Bowman: Two protests confronting each other in Upper Senate Park (in Washington, DC).

7) Denver Post: Two suspects in custody in connection with Eagle County armed robbery where one person was shot.

8) WRAL News (Raleigh, NC): Just in: Authorities evacuate Chatham County Food Lion after bomb threat (it was later revealed that no bomb was found).

9) PRI's The World: This Afghan teen rapper has gone from poverty in Afghanistan to eating sushi in the US (she resides at a boarding school in Utah).

10) Montreal Gazette: "Justice Minister Stephanie Vallee to make announcement regarding gender change status."

http://www.twitter.com

Casulaties of Modern Technology (6 of 12)_ The Calculator

Greetings to all our blog readers in Turku, Finland, and Kobe, Japan, or whereever else you might be today.

By happenstance, I came across the Little Professor* calculator I used in the third grade in 1979; alas, it no longer seems to function.

And, though calculators are still used to a varying degree, it seems safe to assume that they are indeed a Casualty of Modern Technology.

The modern calculators that were used to assist with basic math were first developed in the 1960s. Pocket-sized calculators came about a decade later in the 1970s. And, it was around the disco era, when calculators became both small and affordable for everyone, including elementary school students.

This, in turn, created a debate about whether calculators should be used in the classroom or not. Many math teachers feared that the calculator would diminsh student math skills. But, while the matter became more controversial in Europe, American school teachers gradually seemed to accept the likes of the Little Professor in the classroom.

As they evolved, calculators were also able to perform more advanced technigues, such as trigonometry and stats.

In 1986, according to Wikipedia, the calculator accounted for 41 percent of all general purpose hardware. But, by 2007, calculators accounted for less than 0.005 percent of general purpose hardware.

*-Whoops, we initially incorrectly referred to the Little Professor calculators as Mister Professor calculators!