Word: alphabets
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...extracurricular role of calculators emerged as mathematically minded users found that the versatile devices could be used to play sleight-of-button games and spell words. Because on most calculators, the glowing digits of the readout screen, when inverted, look more or less like letters of the alphabet,* the calculator owner can use the machine to compose more than 100 words and endless riddles. For example, to get the calculator to devise words suggestive of the energy crisis: put 42.46407 into the machine, divide by 3 and multiply by 5. Upside down the machine spells ShELL OIL (the floating decimal...
...through a catalogue of human accomplishment, from Pythagoras on the mathematical laws that govern the universe to the revolutionary observations of Ptolemy, Copernicus and Galileo; from Newton's experiments on the diffraction of light to James Watson and Francis Crick's discovery of the key to the alphabet of life, the master molecule...
Noting the speed in which new initialed combinations have joined the pro sports alphabet soup, it is only a matter of time before the moguls throw in the WTC, or World Team Crew...
...small island kingdom a millennium removed from Camelot. In telling of Kamehameha, the very real soldier who waged a 30-years' war (1780-1810) to create an Hawaiian nation, Tregaskis leaned indulgently on legends of the sort that defy time and locale. The Polynesians had neither calendar nor alphabet before English-speaking traders started settling in the islands in the 1780s. Knowledge of Kamehameha's early career is misty, accounts of his later life were colored by success: by that time he had become a powerful King, and most of his enemies were dead...
...also attempted to eradicate all foreign influence from Libya. Everywhere, even on street signs, Arabic letters have supplanted the Latin alphabet...