The United States Academic Decathlon is an annual high school academic
competition organized by the non-profit United States Academic
Decathlon Association. Created by Robert Peterson in Orange County,
California for local schools in 1968 and expanded to a nationwide
setting in 1981, the competition consists of seven thematically linked
multiple choice tests in art, economics, language and literature, math,
music, science and social science, as well as three subjective events
graded by judges: essay, interview and speech. Teams generally consist
of nine members, who are divided into three divisions based on grade
point average. Each team member competes in all ten events against
other students in his or her division, and team scores are calculated
using the top two overall individual scores from each team in all three
divisions. To earn a spot at the national competition in April, teams
must advance through local, regional, and state competitions. Online
competitions, separated into "small", "medium", and "large"
categories,
are also offered.
Read the rest of this article:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Academic_Decathlon>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1865:
American Army soldiers cornered and fatally shot John Wilkes Booth, the
assassin of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, in rural northern Virginia,
ending a twelve-day manhunt.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkes_Booth>
1937:
Spanish Civil War: The Bombing of Guernica by the Condor Legion of the
German Luftwaffe resulted in a devastating firestorm that caused
widespread destruction and civilian deaths in the Basque town.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Guernica>
1958:
The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Royal Blue, one of the first major
railway electrification systems in the United States, made its final
Washington, D.C., to New York City run.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Blue_%28train%29>
1986:
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near Chernobyl, Ukrainian SSR,
suffered a steam explosion, resulting in a fire, a nuclear meltdown,
and the evacuation and resettlement of over 336,000 people around
Europe.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster_effects>
2007:
Controversy surrounding the relocation of the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn
in Tallinn, Estonia, a Soviet Red Army World War II memorial, erupted
into mass protests and riots.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Night>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
didactic (adj):
1. Instructive or intended to teach or demonstrate, especially with
regard to morality.
2. Excessively moralizing
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/didactic>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.
If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but
timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the
present.
Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no
limits.
--Ludwig Wittgenstein
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein>