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Joseph Park Babcock
Joseph Park Babcock (1893 – 1949), American popularizer of Mahjong, was born in Lafayette, Indiana. After graduating from Purdue University with a degree in Civil Engineering, he worked for the Standard Oil Company. In 1912 he was sent to Soochow, China, as a representative of Standard Oil. There he and his wife enjoyed playing the Chinese tile game. He created a simplified version of Mahjong with a goal of introducing the game to America. He trademarked the spelling "Mah-Jongg" which he apparently coined. His ''Rules of Mah-Jongg'', or the red book, (1920) was used as a rule book for English language players. The game quickly became popular, but several versions were played. In 1924, the Standardization Committee of the American Official Laws of Mah-Jongg was formed. Babcock was an integral member, and the committee published a standardized rule set. Many game sets were then produced in the United States by several companies. Babcock died in New York City ...
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Mahjong
Mahjong or mah-jongg (English pronunciation: ) is a tile-based game that was developed in the 19th century in China and has spread throughout the world since the early 20th century. It is commonly played by four players (with some three-player variations found in parts of China, Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia). The game and its regional variants are widely played throughout East and Southeast Asia and have also become popular in Western countries. The game has also been adapted into a widespread online entertainment. Similar to the Western card game rummy, Mahjong is a game of skill, strategy, and luck. To distinguish it from mahjong solitaire, it is sometimes referred to as mahjong rummy. The game is played with a set of 144 tiles based on Chinese characters and symbols, although many regional variations may omit some tiles or add unique ones. In most variations, each player begins by receiving 13 tiles. In turn, players draw and discard tiles until they complete ...
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Lafayette, Indiana
Lafayette ( , ) is a city in and the county seat of Tippecanoe County, Indiana, United States, located northwest of Indianapolis and southeast of Chicago. West Lafayette, on the other side of the Wabash River, is home to Purdue University, which contributes significantly to both communities. Together, Lafayette and West Lafayette form the core of the Lafayette metropolitan area, which had a population of 224,709 in th2021 US Census Bureau estimates According to the 2020 United States Census, the population of Lafayette was 70,783, a 25% increase from 56,397 in 2000. Meanwhile, the 2020 Census listed the neighboring city of West Lafayette at 44,595 and the Tippecanoe County population at 186,291. Lafayette was founded in 1825 on the southeast bank of the Wabash River near where the river becomes impassable for riverboats upstream, though a French fort and trading post had existed since 1717 on the opposite bank and three miles downstream. It was named for the French general ...
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Indiana
Indiana () is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. It is the 38th-largest by area and the 17th-most populous of the 50 States. Its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th state on December 11, 1816. It is bordered by Lake Michigan to the northwest, Michigan to the north, Ohio to the east, the Ohio River and Kentucky to the south and southeast, and the Wabash River and Illinois to the west. Various indigenous peoples inhabited what would become Indiana for thousands of years, some of whom the U.S. government expelled between 1800 and 1836. Indiana received its name because the state was largely possessed by native tribes even after it was granted statehood. Since then, settlement patterns in Indiana have reflected regional cultural segmentation present in the Eastern United States; the state's northernmost tier was settled primarily by people from New England and New York, Central Indiana by migrants fro ...
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Purdue University
Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and money to establish a college of science, technology, and agriculture in his name. The first classes were held on September 16, 1874, with six instructors and 39 students. It has been ranked as among the best public universities in the United States by major institutional rankings, and is renowned for its engineering program. The main campus in West Lafayette offers more than 200 majors for undergraduates, over 70 masters and doctoral programs, and professional degrees in pharmacy, veterinary medicine, and doctor of nursing practice. In addition, Purdue has 18 intercollegiate sports teams and more than 900 student organizations. Purdue is the founding member of the Big Ten Conference and enrolls the largest student body of any individual uni ...
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Civil Engineering
Civil engineering is a professional engineering discipline that deals with the design, construction, and maintenance of the physical and naturally built environment, including public works such as roads, bridges, canals, dams, airports, sewage systems, pipelines, structural components of buildings, and railways. Civil engineering is traditionally broken into a number of sub-disciplines. It is considered the second-oldest engineering discipline after military engineering, and it is defined to distinguish non-military engineering from military engineering. Civil engineering can take place in the public sector from municipal public works departments through to federal government agencies, and in the private sector from locally based firms to global Fortune 500 companies. History Civil engineering as a discipline Civil engineering is the application of physical and scientific principles for solving the problems of society, and its history is intricately linked to advances i ...
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Standard Oil Company
Standard Oil Company, Inc., was an American oil production, transportation, refining, and marketing company that operated from 1870 to 1911. At its height, Standard Oil was the largest petroleum company in the world, and its success made its co-founder and chairman, John D. Rockefeller, who is among the wealthiest Americans of all time and among the richest people in modern history. Its history as one of the world's first and largest multinational corporations ended in 1911, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was an illegal monopoly. The company was founded in 1863 by Rockefeller and Henry Flagler, and was incorporated in 1870. Standard Oil dominated the oil products market initially through horizontal integration in the refining sector, then, in later years vertical integration; the company was an innovator in the development of the business trust. The Standard Oil trust streamlined production and logistics, lowered costs, and undercut competitors. " Trust-busti ...
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Suzhou
Suzhou (; ; Suzhounese: ''sou¹ tseu¹'' , Mandarin: ), alternately romanized as Soochow, is a major city in southern Jiangsu province, East China. Suzhou is the largest city in Jiangsu, and a major economic center and focal point of trade and commerce. Administratively, Suzhou is a prefecture-level city with a population of 6,715,559 in the city proper, and a total resident population of 12,748,262 as of the 2020 census in its administrative area. The city jurisdiction area's north waterfront is on a lower reach of the Yangtze whereas it has its more focal south-western waterfront on Lake Tai – crossed by several waterways, its district belongs to the Yangtze River Delta region. Suzhou is now part of the Greater Shanghai metro area, incorporating most of Changzhou, Wuxi and Suzhou urban districts plus Kunshan and Taicang, with a population of more than 38,000,000 residents as of 2020. Its urban population grew at an unprecedented rate of 6.5% between 2000 and 2014, wh ...
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China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and borders fourteen countries by land, the most of any country in the world, tied with Russia. Covering an area of approximately , it is the world's third largest country by total land area. The country consists of 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four municipalities, and two Special Administrative Regions (Hong Kong and Macau). The national capital is Beijing, and the most populous city and financial center is Shanghai. Modern Chinese trace their origins to a cradle of civilization in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. The semi-legendary Xia dynasty in the 21st century BCE and the well-attested Shang and Zhou dynasties developed a bureaucratic political system to serve hereditary monarchies, or ...
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American Mahjong
American mahjong, also spelled mah jongg, is a variant of the Chinese game mahjong. American mahjong utilizes racks to hold each player's tiles, jokers, and "Hands and Rules" score cards. It has several distinct gameplay mechanics such as "The Charleston", which is a set of required passes, and optional passing of the tiles. American mahjong is played with four players using mah jongg tiles. The goal of the game is to be the first, by picking and discarding, to match one's tiles to a ''specific'' hand from the annually distributed scorecard published by the National Mah Jongg League (NMJL) and American Mah-Jongg Association (AMJA). Scoring is done by matching the points assigned to each pre-determined hand on the annually distributed NMJL card & AMJA card. History Joseph Park Babcock, a representative of the Standard Oil Company in Shanghai, was importing mahjong sets to the United States in great numbers by 1923. To increase interest in the game, which was sometimes impenetrabl ...
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Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
The ''Pittsburgh Tribune-Review'', also known as "the Trib," is the second largest daily newspaper serving metropolitan Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the United States. Although it transitioned to an all-digital format on December 1, 2016, it remains the second largest daily in the state, with nearly one million unique page views a month. Founded on August 22, 1811, as the ''Greensburg Gazette'' and in 1889 consolidated with several papers into the ''Greensburg Tribune-Review'', the paper circulated only in the eastern suburban counties of Westmoreland and parts of Indiana and Fayette until May 1992, when it began serving all of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area after a strike at the two Pittsburgh dailies, the ''Pittsburgh Post-Gazette'' and '' Pittsburgh Press'', deprived the city of a newspaper for several months. The Tribune-Review Publishing Company was owned by Richard Mellon Scaife, an heir to the Mellon banking, oil, and aluminum fortune, until his death in July 2014. Sc ...
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New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the United States, and is more than twice as populous as second-place Los Angeles. New York City lies at the southern tip of New York State, and constitutes the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass. With over 20.1 million people in its metropolitan statistical area and 23.5 million in its combined statistical area as of 2020, New York is one of the world's most populous megacities, and over 58 million people live within of the city. New York City is a global cultural, financial, entertainment, and media center with a significant influence on commerce, health care and life sciences, research, technology, education, ...
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1893 Births
Events January–March * January 2 – Webb C. Ball introduces railroad chronometers, which become the general railroad timepiece standards in North America. * Mark Twain started writing Puddn'head Wilson. * January 6 – The Washington National Cathedral is chartered by Congress; the charter is signed by President Benjamin Harrison. * January 13 ** The Independent Labour Party of the United Kingdom has its first meeting. ** U.S. Marines from the ''USS Boston'' land in Honolulu, Hawaii, to prevent the queen from abrogating the Bayonet Constitution. * January 15 – The ''Telefon Hírmondó'' service starts with around 60 subscribers, in Budapest. * January 17 – Overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii: Lorrin A. Thurston and the Citizen's Committee of Public Safety in Hawaii, with the intervention of the United States Marine Corps, overthrow the government of Queen Liliuokalani. * January 21 ** The Cherry Sisters first perform in Marion, Iowa. ** The ...
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