Breaking News Thread Version 2.0

[Krandall]

Awesome

http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/09/10/medal.of.honor.recipient/index.html?hpt=T2

That's way cool. You don't find men/women like that every day.
I wonder. Has a woman ever won a MoH?

[Colorado700R]

Awesome

http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/09/10/medal.of.honor.recipient/index.html?hpt=T2

That's way cool. You don't find men/women like that every day.
I wonder. Has a woman ever won a MoH?

Only Woman Medal of Honor Holder Ahead of Her Time
By Rudi Williams
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, April 30, 1999 – Whenever Ann Walker's brattish attitude emerged, her grandmother would often say, "You're just like your great- aunt Mary."

"When I was a teen-ager, I started to wonder, who is this great- aunt Mary?" said Walker, 74. "I sort of hungered for information about her, but I couldn't find much. Nobody, including my grandmother, seemed to care about her. She always said, 'Your aunt was always dressing like a man.'"

Her curiosity surged when one of her father's friends, a history professor, told her about her distant relative, actually her great-great-aunt, Dr. Mary Edwards Walker of the Civil War Union Army. He told her Mary Walker was the first American woman to be a military doctor, a prisoner of war and a Medal of Honor recipient. She was also a Union spy and a crusader against tobacco and alcohol.

"He told me she was always imitating men, and if she had dressed like a lady, she would have had a larger role in history," said Walker, a resident of Washington's Georgetown Aged Women's Home. A retired free-lance journalist, Walker said she's working on a book, "Woman of Honor," to tell the story of her aunt's Civil War exploits and her controversial life thereafter.

Through the family friend and research, Ann Walker learned her aunt was born on Nov. 26, 1832, in Oswego County, N.Y., and graduated from Syracuse Medical College in 1855. She married fellow medical student Albert Miller, but declined to take his name. The couple set up a medical practice in Rome, N.Y., but the public wasn't ready to accept a woman physician. The practice and the marriage foundered.

When the Civil War started, the Union Army wouldn't hire women doctors, so Walker volunteered as a nurse in Washington's Patent Office Hospital and treated wounded soldiers at the Battle of Bull Run in Virginia. In 1862, she received an Army contract appointing her as an assistant surgeon with the 52nd Ohio Infantry.

The first woman doctor to serve with the Army Medical Corps, Walker cared for sick and wounded troops in Tennessee at Chickamauga and in Georgia during the Battle of Atlanta.

Confederate troops captured her on April 10, 1864, and held her until the sides exchanged prisoners of war on Aug. 12, 1864. Walker worked the final months of the war at a women's prison in Louisville, Ky., and later at an orphans' asylum in Tennessee.

The Army nominated Walker for the Medal of Honor for her wartime service. President Andrew Johnson signed the citation on Nov. 11, 1865, and she received the award on Jan. 24, 1866. Her citation cites her wartime service, but not specifically valor in combat.

Walker's citation reads in part that she "devoted herself with much patriotic zeal to the sick and wounded soldiers, both in the field and hospitals, to the detriment of her own health. She has also endured hardships as a prisoner of war for four months in a Southern prison while acting as contract surgeon."

The War Department, starting in 1916, reviewed all previous Medal of Honor awards with the intent of undoing decades of abuse. At the time, for instance, the medal could be freely copied and sold and legally worn by anyone. Past awards would be rescinded and future ones would be rejected if supporting evidence didn't clearly, convincingly show combat valor above and beyond the call of duty.

Mary Walker and nearly 1,000 past recipients found their medals revoked in the reform. Wearing the medal if unearned became a crime. The Army demanded Walker and the others return their medals. She refused and wore hers until her death at age 87 in 1919.

In the late 1960s, Ann Walker launched an intensive lobbying campaign to restore her aunt's medal. A Nov. 25, 1974, letter from the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee read, in part, "It's clear your great-grandaunt was not only courageous during the term she served as a contract doctor in the Union Army, but also as an outspoken proponent of feminine rights. Both as a doctor and feminist, she was much ahead of her time and, as is usual, she was not regarded kindly by many of her contemporaries. Today she appears prophetic."

President Jimmy Carter restored Mary Walker's Medal of Honor on June 11, 1977. Today, it's on display in the Pentagon's women's corridor.

Walker said her relative was controversial on the battlefield and in civilian life. During the war, she wore trousers under her skirt, a man's uniform jacket and two pistols. As an early women's rights advocate, particularly for dress reform, she was arrested many times after the war for wearing men's clothes, including wing collar, bow tie and top hat.

The Women in Military Service to America Memorial at Arlington (Va.) National Cemetery features the story of Dr. Mary E. Walker along with a photograph of her and her walking cane. Curator Judy Bellafaire called Walker "quite a character," and one whose ideas made her seem eccentric in her own day and age.

"But judging her from today's perspective, much of what she spoke and wrote about, that people made fun of at the time, is probably true today," Bellafaire said. Walker, she said, wrote volumes about the evils of tobacco and alcohol and women's clothes and authored two books: "Unmasked" and "Hit," a fictionalized autobiography.

"My most favorite of her sayings is, 'Let the generations know that women in uniform also guaranteed their freedom,'" Ann Walker said. "She was strong. I wish I'd known her. It would have been fun."

[Krandall]

Interesting, Thanks Aaron

[Hefe]

BREAKING NEWS!!!!

Hefe is whoring today!

[Krandall]

BREAKING NEWS!!!!

Hefe is a whore!

Funny pics thread. Maybe peelz could use help on the corner.

[Spartan]

BREAKING NEWS!!!!

Hefe is whoring today!

Street corner busy again huh?

[Colorado700R]

Pi record smashed as team finds two-quadrillionth digit By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter BBC News 16-Sep 2010

A researcher has calculated the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit of pi - and a few digits either side of it.

Nicholas Sze, of technology firm Yahoo, determined that the digit - when expressed in binary - is 0.

Mr Sze used Yahoo's Hadoop cloud computing technology to more than double the previous record.

The computation took 23 days on 1,000 of Yahoo's computers, racking up the equivalent of more than 500 years of a single computer's efforts.

The heart of the calculation made use of an approach called MapReduce originally developed by Google that divides up big problems into smaller sub-problems, combining the answers to solve otherwise intractable mathematical challenges.

At Yahoo, a cluster of 1,000 computers implemented this algorithm to solve an equation that plucks out specific digits of pi.

Pi slicing

The pursuit of longer versions of pi is a long-standing pastime among mathematicians.

But this approach is very different from the full calculation of all of the digits of pi - the record for which was set in January at 2.7 trillion digits.

Instead, each of the Hadoop computers was working on a formula that turns a complicated equation for pi into a small set of mathematical steps, returning just one, specific piece of pi.

"Interestingly, by some algebraic manipulations, (our) formula can compute pi with some bits skipped; in other words, it allows computing specific bits of pi," Mr Sze explained to BBC News.

Fabrice Bellard, who undertook the full calculation announced in January, told BBC News that the single-digit and full pi calculation are vastly different in the degree to which they can be "parallelised" - that is, cut up into manageable pieces among different computers.

He said the current, single-digit record is "more a demonstration of the Hadoop parallelisation framework... it can demonstrate the power of new algorithms which could be useful in other fields".

The record-breaking MapReduce approach, he said, is useful in physics, cryptography and data mining.

Mr Sze added that the calculation was also a good test for the Hadoop hardware and approach.

"This kind of calculation is useful in benchmarking and testing," he said.

"We have used it to compare the [processor] performance among our clusters."

[Krandall]

thats awesome.

[Colorado700R]

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- A helicopter with three people on board crashed about a mile south of the summit of Pikes Peak Friday morning.

The 7:30 a.m. crash occurred near Elk Park and the Cog Railway.

El Paso County Search and Rescue is responding to the scene and said a medical helicopter is headed to the scene.

Bob Gillis of the Pikes Peak Hill Climb said the helicopter was filming a test for the Pikes Peak Hill Climb. He said the pilot is seriously injured and two other people have minor injuries.

This is the second helicopter crash in the Pikes Peak area in the past three months.

In June, an AH-64D Apache Longbow from the 10th Combat Aviation Brigade, 10th Mountain Division from Fort Drum, N.Y., crashed just south of Pikes Peak. Two pilots were hurt. The helicopter crew was conducting high altitude mountain environment training in preparation for deployment to Afghanistan.


Umm, dats a bigass mountain.....take your supercharged eggbeaters around it, instead of over it

[Krandall]

noobz.

[Spartan]

GET TO DA CHOPPA!!!!

"Ummmm we just hit the mountain...get to the goat"

[Colorado700R]

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/09/21/vietnam.medal.of.honor.survivor/index.html?hpt=C1

[Peelz]

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/09/21/vietnam.medal.of.honor.survivor/index.html?hpt=C1

cool story.

[Krandall]

dang cool

[Segkast]

For Peelsy:

http://www.q13fox.com/news/kcpq-091410-typohunt,0,5052898.story

SEATTLE -
It's a growing crisis all around us that affects the very way we communicate. We're talking about typos: not the kind you find in emails, but the ones we see in signs all around our neighborhoods.

Think about it. How many times have you driven by a sign, seen a misspelling or some bad grammar, and thought, I wonder if whoever put that up knows there's something wrong? Well now, you've got some help on your side--a dynamic duo of typo hunters who say they're trying to change the world one correction at a time.

Look closely, and you'll see we are surrounded by misspellings. Copy editor Jeff Deck says he can't take it anymore. Says Deck, "I've been noticing typos pretty much my entire life. So I figured I could better the world by hunting down typos and fixing them." Jeff and his friend Benjamin Herson are evangelists of sorts. As Herson puts it, "We're trying to spread the gospel of taking a second look."

The Typo Eradication Advancement League, otherwise known as Jeff and Ben and their waterproof marker collection, say even small typos can make a significant impact. Deck says, "It gives a sense that people really aren't paying attention to the details there and aren't putting the care into that neighborhood." The two don't just point out the typos. They ask permission from business owners and correct them.

At Skarbos Furniture in Ballard, it was changing "Furnitupe" to "Furniture." On one sidewalk cafe chalkboard sign, it was a little tougher. On "Raspberry," someone had forgotten the "P." Jeff had to do a quick web check for the spelling of Grand "Marnier" liqueur. It's not Grand "Mariner," as the sign reads, especially this baseball season.

Jeff and Ben consider their job almost a civic duty. They even found a problem with Initiative 101, an anti-tunnel signature-gathering petition. "Inititive," the sign reads. Now, that type of miscue may not change your vote, and actually doesn't bother some people. "No, no, it makes me feel smarter," said passer-by Tad Davis.

But the more you think about it, the more you realize Jeff and Ben's point. As another passer-by, Linda Livingston, told us, "We have to maintain the integrity of our language, and if we don't learn how to spell things right, then where does it all lead?"

Never fear, Linda. The typo heroes are here, for truth, good spelling and the American way.



Check out the Typo Eradication Advancement League  website here for pictures of a typo near you.