Free Republic

For those of us who still love getting our news from newspapers, those inky, crinkly, thin sheets of wood pulp you hold in your hands and read, these indeed are sad times. Print newspapers, thanks in large part to the meteoric rise of smartphones and online and social media, are in serious decline. [Snip] Many media analysts believe it won’t be long before print newspapers disappear. If it happens, they in large part will be devoured by a voracious horde of online and social media, many of which have little respect for the notion that the first function of news...

Slides Rule At a gathering of the Oughtred Society, the reckoning may be dead or logarithmic, but the conversation is always right on the mark BY SILKE TUDOR To those born after 1970, the thought of sending someone into space with a slide rule seems ridiculous, but, to early Apollo crews, the mere thought of going up without one would have been a good enough reason to scrub a launch. Slide rules (the Pickett N600-ES Dual Base Log/Log to be precise) were compulsory equipment during our first five trips to the moon; in fact, Neil Armstrong probably determined the distance...