HMS Hood was a battlecruiser of the British Royal Navy, commissioned in 1920. Hood was the largest warship in the world for 20 years and was nicknamed "the Mighty Hood". She was involved in several showing-the- flag exercises prior to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. She was scheduled to undergo a major rebuild in 1941 but the war prevented this. In July 1940 she participated in the destruction of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir. On 24 May 1941 Hood and the battleship Prince of Wales intercepted the German battleship Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen in the Battle of the Denmark Strait. Hood was struck by several German shells, exploded, and sank with the loss of all but three of her crew of 1,418. The Royal Navy conducted two inquiries; both concluded that Hood's aft magazine exploded after a shell penetrated her armour. Hood's wreck was discovered in 2001. (This article is part of a featured topic: Battlecruisers of the world.).
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_topics/Battlecruisers_of_the_world
_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1950:
The 14th Dalai Lama assumed full temporal power as ruler of Tibet at the age of fifteen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Dalai_Lama
1968:
NBC controversially cut away from an American football game between the Oakland Raiders and New York Jets to broadcast Heidi, causing viewers in the Eastern United States to miss the game's dramatic ending. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidi_Game
2009:
Administrators at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit discovered that their servers had been hacked and thousands of emails and files on climate change had been stolen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy
_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:
ulp: 1. The sound of a person gulping in fear. [...] 2. (computer science, mathematics) The value that the least significant digit of a floating-point number represents, used as a measure of accuracy in numeric calculations. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ulp
___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:
Politics, as I never tire of saying, is for social and emotional misfits, handicapped folk, those with a grudge. The purpose of politics is to help them overcome these feelings of inferiority and compensate for their personal inadequacies in the pursuit of power. --Auberon Waugh https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Auberon_Waugh