Thanks to the efforts of the good folks at Mental Floss, you can learn a couple of neat things about that invaluable friend of English comp writers, the thesaurus.
The one that interested me the most was the knowledge that Peter Mark Roget, the man credited with the development of the modern English thesaurus (the best-known of which bears his name today) was also a medical doctor. His birthday of January 18 is observed as "Thesaurus Day."
And he invented the log-log slide rule, a specialized version of that old mathematical tool that displayed the logarithm of a logarithm and thus allowed the user to directly manipulate roots and exponents in calculations.
My doctor's pretty cool, but I don't see him branching out like that.
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