Slashdot Mirror
The Sliderule As Paleo-Geek Artifact
hwestiii writes: "Geek identification methods have waxed and waned over the years. Back in the years when it was still not cool to be a geek, they were identified by their pocket protectors and calculators hanging from their belts. And way back in the mists of time, before most of the Slashdot crowd were even an item on their parent's life-project-plan, they were identified by possession of ... slide rules. I'm clearly dating myself by submitting this, but I owned and used slide rules as a teen, just as microelectronics was making cheap calculators possible. Nando times has an interesting link to a community of people around the country trying to keep the memory and spirit of the slide rule alive. Some may be wistful, some may think 'What the hell...?' Take a look." A quick look at Google's image search yielded some cool photos of both slide rules and the classic HP-35 calculator -- I wonder where the HP-35 my dad used to use has gotten to. Does anyone still use slide rules on a regular basis?
I still have it, functional, of course. It is an amazing machine.
History of the curta, and a picture of the : model I
Cheers,
--fred
How the hell can slide rules be considered news?
1 pound sterling = 20s (shilling)
shilling = 12d (penny)
Bob = 1s
Florin = 2s
Crown = 5s
Guinea = 21s
haypenny = 1/2d
farthing = 1/4d
tuppence = 2d
thruppence = 3d
Groat = 4d
Tanner = 6d
1/2 groat = 10/6d
What could be simpler??
Apparently I need to re-read Bob's Quick guide to the apostrophe, you idiots.
--
If California's energy crisis turns computers into pricey paperweights and makes AA batteries as scarce as vacuum tubes, Tom Wyman will still be able to perform vital calculations such as finding the square root of 144 or figuring the value of 2 to the power of 10.
Are American's today really so uneducated that they can't find the square root of 144, or the value of 2^10 without using a calculator?
Apparently the author thinks these are otherwise unsolveable mathematical mysteries... I sincerely hope he's not representative of the average man.
--
My Dad (an engineer) gave me a Bamboo K&E he got as a gift from his grandfather (a machinist) in the 1930s. It was a lovely piece of work, but I preferred an aluminum Pickett with its yellow face. It was more... modern.
:)
Sadly, I lost many of my better tools, including slide rules and great-grandfather's calipers and other measuring instruments, years ago. Good thing I have calculators and computers now.
And for those of you who are not familiar with such things, all you *really* need to navigate is a sextant, a watch or clock, a chart, and a copy of H.O. 249. A compass is nice, but not totally essential. Now let's see how many "kids today" know how to swing a compass, eh? (Or even what that means!)
A lot of what I know is now obsolete... how to prop-start a plane... how to balance dual, triple or quad carburetors... morse code... the list goes on, and it's a long one.
But I don't feel bad. One day the "kids today" will have their grandkids look up from their voice-operated or neurologically-jacked computers and say, "Grandpa, what's a keyboard?"
- Robin
Except most private pilots now-a-days buy a hand held GPS and never use an E6B except during checkrides.
--
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
As mentioned, he has a site with sliderules on it. They didn't reference the site's address, but here it is. http://www.sliderule.ca/.
Secret windows code
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
My first encounter with a slide rule was after a high school math exam (back in 1987). I finished the exam, and walked back to hand it in to my teacher and saw him using one to calculate percentages with one. Intrigued, I asked him about it and he showed me how it worked based on logarithms. I thought it was really cool and asked him where I could get one. He reached into one of his desk drawers, which was full of them, pulled one out and gave it to me. Thrilled, my next stop was to the library to find any books I could get my hands on about how to use one. Taught myself the basics of using a slide rule. I was even using it to do some of my physics homework when I got into university. I hadn't gotten very fast at it, but i could get the right answers. Then I got myself an HP-28S, and the slide rule now sits on my shelf with my collection of artifacts. I still pull it out now and then to play with it and show it to the occasional person that asks about it.
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
--
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
I have a friend who teaches in a local high school. This year one of the math teachers decided to throw out a lot of the older math teaching aids, including a 7 foot slide rule! When my friend heard about it, he immediately thought of me. I've now got my mondo slide rule propped against an upstairs wall, waiting for those really big problems to roll in...
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 4th Ed., Vol 2
I remember back in college (circa 1991) going into an engineering professor's office and seeing a gigantic wooden sliderule about 5 feet in length. Apparently, the engineering fundamentals program spent the first few weeks using such props to instruct engineers-to-be on the finer points of how to use a sliderule. Now they just teach them how to use a high level language like Matlab, tell them to forget common sense, and always believe the answer that the computer gives them.
Sliderules should be used as part of an engineering appreciation course along with hand calculations and calculators that cost $500.
Tell that to people 20-30 miles away that would not be blinded by the flash in a bombing with a stolen missle.
James Ray Kenney mailto:jrkenney@swbell.net
Turns out I was right...one day I walked into a Physics exam and my (scientific) calculator went bust before the exam started. (This was Physics 152 at Purdue University...very painful course.) Because I was able to do the math mostly in my head, plus some pen-and-paper work, I managed to finish the exam, without a calculator, with a half hour to spare, and still get a 90%. I think the cutoff for an A was something insane like 66%.
It made for an interesting discussion with my study partner:
partner I got a hundred.
me I got a ninety. But I have a good excuse.
partner Oh really..
me I didn't have my calculator.
partner Oh. (pause) That's a good excuse.
Finding God in a Dog
The link: http://www.taswegian.com/SRTP/JavaSlide/javaslide. html
n76lima had a space in the link.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
WTH? http://www.taswegian.com/SRTP/JavaSlide/javaslide. html
;)
Oops, and then I added a spaceThere were more spaces than I thought.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
"users still had to figure out where the decimal point should go. (Multiply 4 by 5 on a slide rule and the answer is 2, not 20.)"
This would cause problems with some people I know that use calculators to multiply and divide by 10..
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
He killed himself after the War Department decided to use his "invention" (which he called 'graphitics') for piloted missiles whose crews would be on suicide missions, of course.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
Insurance underwriters use an "Easy Rate Wheel," or circular slide rule. On simple coverages, this enables them to get a rate, payment plan, tax, deductible, etc. in a few seconds.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
A sovereign is a pound, so it's twenty shillings. It's sometimes shortened to 'sovs' (as in five sovs == five pounds), but not used a lot as slang these days. 'Quid' is the common slang for 'pounds'. To contribute to more topic drift, here's more info on slang names for British money.
You missed out the half-crown (2/6). Groats disappeared in the 19th century, and the farthing was discontinued in the 1960s.
Also, your notation is a little confusing (!). The common way to write an amount of shillings and pence was ss/dd (d=pence, from the Latin 'denari', obviously). So, half of five shillings (a crown) is two-and-sixpence, which is 2/6. A ha'penny is half a penny, but 1/2d could be confused with one-and-tuppence (i.e., fourteen pence). Similarly, a farthing is a quarter of a penny, not one-and-fourpence. And since a groat is fourpence, half a groat is tuppence, not 10/6d, which is half a guinea.
There were copper-type coins for the farthing, the halfpenny (==ha'penny), and the penny, a twelve-sided bronze-type coin for threepence (known as the thruppenny bit), a tiddly little silver-type coin for sixpence, progressively larger silver-type coins for a shilling, two shillings (formally called the florin, but everyone just called it two bob), the half-crown and the crown (which was about two inches across), then the notes started at ten shillings (== a ten bob note), a pound, five pounds, ten pounds, etc.. If there was an official coin or note for the guinea, I never saw one.
HTH.
I can't be the *only* one posting to slashdot from a Kueffel & Esser Duplex 4080-3 rule, can I?
Cheers,
Jim
MMDC Mobile Media
-- My Weblog.
However, most of the time, another letter follows each letter, so if you allow for a slightly longer pause, then you can usually guess what the duration of the last pulse was. Even if you can't, you can make an educated guess. For example:
If you hear: hit---hithithit, that could either be a B (dah-dit-dit-dit), or a X (dah-dit-dit-dah). IF the next letter you hear is (hithit---hithit), that could only be an L. An X is very unlikely to precede an L, so you assume its a B.
Yes, its much tricker than standard morse code, but if you're in a jail cell with nothing else to do.... ;)
Bush should have died, not Reagan -- Morrissey
Morrissey rides a cockhorse -- The Warlock Pinchers
The table is based on rules sold on ebay from December 1999 to June 2000 inclusive.
John 17:20
I do the same with my full-featured K-E log-log deci-trig etc. slide rule at the office. Some problems are perfect slide rule problems, this is one of them. Anything involving similar ratios where 2-3 digit precision is fine. Set the rule once and read off the height of the graphic for any column width.
It also elicits wonderful looks from my coworkers.
In a lot of k-12 schools calculators are bought for *every* student starting out in kindergarden. This boggles my mind for the same reason you point out; You should be able to know about where the answer should be. Using/depending on calculators hinders this process, you rely more on the output of the LCD, then your own brain...
HP48GX user, and damn proud....
Addition is the fundamental operation on a slide rule. (1.27 inches plus 5.31 inches is 6.58 inches...that's what all the sliding is about!) Multiplication is done by adding logarithms.
The great thing about slide rules is that they were laid out in order to facilitate calculations, according to the order in whcih calculations tend to be done. Do one, flip it over, do another, flip over again, and so on until the answer was obtained. Besides, using the rule one gets a feel for numbers and math as something real, not something made-up and irrelevant. Man, I loved using that slide rule. Sigh...
Not airline pilots (someone please correct me if this is true for anything other than Air Zambia) but I know a number of private pilots - both powered and glider - that use them. No batteries, no hard-to-read displays, gives the right answer nice and quickly too :)
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
It was an integral part of my costume, second only to the printed circuit board motif. See sexiestgeekalive.com or go straight to the picture and explanation.
"I didn't know how to speeel engineer, and now I are one."
You don't know how to spell 'linear' either.
And it's 'oscillating'.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
Except most private pilots now-a-days buy a hand held GPS and never use an E6B except during checkrides.
Their loss. I'll put money that I can outrun them on a standard E6B for working time/speed/distance. Just dial in your ground speed and read off the time between checkpoint after checkpoint.
Then again, I was annoyed when my examiner made me turn off the VOR receiver for all of my cross country. Hey- he's the one that gave me a route between two VORs. Everyone has the equipment they get used to...
Eric
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I had an experience last semester at my high school where a sliderule really was a paleo-geek artifact. While replacing a row of old lockers, the janitors at our school (HHSS, Ontario) found an old slide rule underneath! It had slid under a locker sometime in the last fifty years or so. Our OAC calculus teacher (OAC is Grade 13, for you crazy Yankees) acquired the rule from the janitors who found it and brought it in to class. Everyone oohed and aahed over it, and the next day one of my friends brought in his dad's old slide rule with a sheet of instructions. I learned how to operate the excavated slide rule and did a whole class with it.
~ Give me 101 plastic soldiers, and I will conquer the world.
I wasn't given any grief when I pulled out my Palm III to grind through some arithmetic on one of my finals...and that's a device intended to hold notes and such (even took all my notes one semester with it, though I switched back to dead trees this past semester as entering equations into Memo Pad is cumbersome). I might've had the first week's notes in there...but since we were allowed both sides of a page to set up as a crib sheet (mine done in 4-point text in Word with so many equations on the page that it started screwing up), the presence or absence of notes in the Palm wouldn't have made much of a difference.
(All I used was the calculator. I don't carry a separate calculator anymore as a Palm does all that a calculator will, and then some. I've never had a graphing calculator...got through math and physics with a TI-68.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
My K&E Decilon is still slip sliding along.
It's scary the calculations you can do using nothing but your brain and a hunk or rotating metal (or plastic, depending on your taste).
Heresy, I tell you. Heresy. Being able to do calculations without using the Holy Semiconductor!
I was an undergraduate in 1974, and pocket calculators were still controversial -- professors railed against allowing them to be used on exams, etc. -- so kept using my slide rule (it's on a shelf not 10 feet from where I sit, covered in dust.) That year, I got my first account on a UNIX box, which came with dc and bc, and I've never since been tempted to buy a pocket calculator.
-Tom Duff
Incorrect. There are various rules on a SR. Two linier rules make for addition. One linier and one geometric make multiplication and division. One linier and one expoential... make a guess.
One Linier and one ossolating (sp?) rule make sin/cos/csc/sec and tan/atan with a bit of work.
At the request to my parents for a birthday present, they had to goto a mesuem gift store's deep storage to get me one.
I didn't know how to speeel engineer, and now I are one.
JLC B.Eng
Well, that's a decision everyone must make for himself. Personally, I enjoy brewing some coffee and getting a nice caffeine fix, but whatever. One man's cheese is another man's rotted milk.
...
Um. We're not talking about the same thing, are we? :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
:wq
It's now cool to be a geek?
Last semester, I attended a course of Electronic. It was really interesting although the teacher was kind of crazzy. During the exams, calculators were forbidden but slide rules were allowed.
It's sad I could not find one, anywhere..
resilience is futile
I still have my KK log-log duplex. I need a new index though. The glass cracked.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Whew! That's cool. This is a great thread. I remember, vividly, the day my dad brought home one of the first HP-35s. And a slide rule. The slide rule was for me, so I wouldn't grow up to be a math cripple. I was crushed. But I learned how to use it... ;)
I am quite civilized, and I should be brought a beer immediately. -- Bruce Sterling
Of course slide rules can add. Everything they do is addition (*); it just happens that if you do addition using a log scale, the net result is multiplication.
If you use a linear scale (which any decent slide rule had), addition is... addition.
(*) or simple table lookup; typically you'd have a few trig tables to play with as well.
I see, so you prefer to argue accuracy over precision? I can see your point, but it was never assummed that the values of x.xx and y.yy were measurements or approximations due to measuring. Taken as exact values (as implied by not stating the source or other information), x.xx by y.yy will result in zz.zzzz.
Rod Taylor
...is the price of their tools.
The Romance of the Slide Rule is very much alive today, the love affair is just transferred to the modern version of the tool.
Slashdotters and Tom's Hardware afficionados who explore every capacity and foible of their machines are following the same urge as slipstick experts who practiced use of the LL/0 scale (which did an e^(-x) operation in one move) just so they were prepared should it come up one day.
I must be almost the same age as "timothy" who started this article - it was slide rules for us up to about grade 12, when the richer kids were all getting calculators that did more than 4 functions...then in University, calculators were suddenly essential (but I carried the Rule to exams in case of battery failure).
What I remember is that most geeky kids were old enough to *learn* to use a slide rule at the start of their teens...right around the time you get coordinated & generally grown-up enough to be allowed to touch precision tools. And slide rules, with their fine machinining, high cost, and smooth movement (metal sucked; bamboo rules...mine still work perfectly after 25 years in the drawer) were clearly *TOOLS*, not toys.
A slide rule was a grown-up possession, a minor Rite of Passage.
I don't think slide rules will ever be forgotten as long as dad's, grandad's and great-granddad's get found in attics. But what worries me is my Dad also taught me dozens of MENTAL calculation tricks that nobody needs any more.
The easiest one was squaring number that ends in five. Chop off the five. Multiply the rest by one greater than itself; tack 25 on the end. (i.e. 35 squared: 3*4=12, the answer is 1225.) The hardest was memorizing ten anti-logs to three places; you can do remarkable estimation-level calcs with that one. (I've long forgotten them.)
Anybody ever done a web page of those tricks?
Wasn't there a whole other variable, as well? The material of the coin?
I recall that guineas weren't just an extra shilling compared to a pound, they were GOLD - and professionals & gentlemen took payment in gold, by preference.
And aren't you missing a unit? Sherlock Holmes stories keep mentioning a "sovereign" and I think that was a gold coin, too...but how many shillings was it worth?
My dad is a civil engineer, and used a slide rule daily in his design work. Therefore he made sure that I had a good one. He had other, much more exotic tools too, such as a polar planimeter. This is a wondrous device that lives in a felt-lined case. You put it together, set it on a drawing, and run a little wheel around a closed figure. From a dial, you read off the area of the figure. It's a mechanical integrator. It's gorgeous. He sold it when he retired. OW!
But I still have my Pickett. It's true that in order to use it, you have to place the decimal point yourself. In scientific calculations this isn't usually too hard, because you start with numbers between one and ten, and figure the exponents separately. The downside is that answers are inexact. You're lucky to be able to carry three significant figures, and you can't even do that if there are more than two or three steps in your calculation. Really, really serious people used very large slide rules with temperature compensation scales (!!!).
The family company had those brute electromechanical calculators with ten-by-ten fields of buttons. Every ten years or so they'd replace the current ones, so when I hit college, I got one of those as a hand-me-down. It must have been almost solid steel, and weighed about forty pounds. I never looked back. Finally I had something that wouldn't reduce a calculation to mush by the fifth step.
Maybe your calculator's no good. If I for example do 4.44 * 6.66, I get exactly 29.5704 as a result. Seems to be the right answer as far as I can tell.
I use a slide rule quite often for converting between, say, pounds and kilos. Since I can just set it and read off the requisite weights, I don't need to get it dirty.
ObSad: Mine is a British Thornton AA 010 Comprehensive. Made in England, don't you know!
That reminds me of a great Isaac Asimov short story I read. "The Feeling of Power" is its title. Taking place in the not-so-distant future, people have become so estranged from basic mathematical abilities that they have not even dreamed it possible to perform mathematical calculations without their pocket computers. However, once a bored technician teaches himself to multiply numbers with only a pencil and paper, whole new possibilities in warfare are re-opened. Eventually, this technician commits suicide because of the disasterous results the discovery of what he thought was just a harmless hobby had. It's very satirical but illustrates how we are becoming increasingly alienated from the roots of the things we use every day.
You can read it for yourself at http://regehr.org/john/reading_list/power.html.
----
My mother was a 9th grade math teacher, and had a giant Pickett slide rule as a classroom aid. I don't know if we kept it after she died, but it was about 3 feet wide and 6 or 8 feet long.
As a geek of the '60s, I had a full size Pickett, but my favorite "pocket protector" item was a nice little pocket slide rule. I remember engineering and physics courses where the early review was how to keep track of magnitudes and precision while doing slide rule calculations.
The only good weather is bad weather.
A while back the Navy stopped teaching older navigation styles, I gather because GPS is so much easier to use. And easier to jam. Sometimes progress is not a good thing and can actually do us harm.
I think teaching at least the basics of these older methods of computation would be a good thing. We should preserve at least the knowledge that they're possible and a basic understanding of how they worked. It could be handy, for instance, to know how to find North using just an analog watch and the sun. Or a digital watch. Would have made The Blair Witch Project a much shorter movie though. "Ok, that's north, so the road is that way! Let's go!"
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I own a dietzgen metal slide rule and a Post bamboo slide rule.
;)"
I was in the last class in high school to learn how to use a slide rule in chemistry. When I went to engineering school I was in the first class to require a scientific calculator.
As a freshman I carried my slide rule with me in my pack as calculators were still to expensive and a little delicate to be walking around with. My Econ prof asked the class if someone would divide two numbers for him. A few students pulled out calculators as I pulled out my sliderule. Natuarlly I had the answer first - sliderules are so much faster than calculators - so I answered his question. He turned to thank me when He stopped mid sentence to ask me "What is this?" - I told him it was an energy efficient calculator. "What will they think of next
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
My Dad, sensing the geek in me, taught me how to use a slide rule when I was a wee lad. At the time calculators were around, but were expensive and used batteries fast on their red screens. The LCD calculators came around about 10 years later, and made batteries last a long long time.
I still have that slide rule though, and I can still use it. But DrGenius is generally faster and closer to hand.
Actually, you probably didn't. Slashcode has the annoying tendancy to insert spaces randomly in long strings of unbroken ASCII characters (it happens a lot with URLs).
You are right that American public schools scuk. But you are wrong about why. It has nothing to do with technology. It has everything to do with society.
As most of us here are well aware, children who strive to excell as educaton, and learning in general are ridiculed and hated by classmates and teachers. That is the problem. American society is more focused on Basketball, and MTV than on real education. Even in college (just graduated, BS CS. WOOHOO!), I met teaching majors who were more concerned with the quarterback than with learning. They thought I was a little out of touch, because I don't even know who played in last year's superbowl, but can do multivariable calculus. AND THESE WERE TEACHERS!!!
Comming from a poor out of the way mining comunity, I've seen education both with, and without technology-it makes no difference. But when teachers, the very people whose responsibility it is to educate children don't even get intersted in education, what else can you expect? In all my time as a student (before college) I found only one teacher who was genuinely interested in education. ONE, in 12 years. And thank god I did too! I will be forever indebted to her for what she did.
Want to see a change in American education? Change the teachers. Get smarter teachers. Get teachers who have a passion for learning, and who have taken a personal stake in education. Don't blame technology.
Fish
So... are you suggesting that we shouldn't be teaching children how to add base-10 numbers by adding columns and carrying the overflow, but rather just teach them which buttons to push on a calculator? Dirt, paper or mental, the argument is the same.
I fail to see how the ability to do math mentally should be replaced by instruction on how to use calculators. Or, as the article had it, determine the square root of 144 or 2 to the power of 10. These can be done mentally more quickly than they could be punched into a calculator. If you didn't have to do it mentally, you could pass your math tests by reading the question "What is the squre root of 144" as "enter 144 and press the square root button" rather than "what number squared gives the result 144?" In other words, it makes it possible to get a "A" without even understanding the question.
At university, I initially found some of my computer science courses a bit abstract, and they seemed slightly pointless, but it was explained this way: we were being taught skills that would be relevant and useful regardless of the changes in technology.
Teaching that would take, what, a day? An hour? http://www.google.com, there, done. Now can we teach them skills they will use regardless of the direction technology takes? Hoping kids stumble across useful information is NOT what education is supposed to be about.
sig fault
I think that was the point I was trying to make... the slide rule IS an application of mathematics to the physical world. As several posters pointed out, it can also give an intuitive and visual understanding of how logarithms work. That would seem to me to be a valuable tool when teaching logarithms, and an example of the application of mathematics, and of problem solving using mathematics. Whether they'll ever actually need to use one seems beside the point.
sig fault
For both the computer and the slide rule, the real power behind them is the mind of the user. Sorry to those of you who realize what I am saying about most computer users out there...
-- The Hollow Man
-- The Hollow Man
Non illegitimati carborundum
Skilled people with the abacus(sp?) can outperform calculators.
~
~
~
~
:wq
I've got an HP-35 too. Curiously, just today I browsed e-bay for the very first time and saw a bid of about $350 for an HP-35 - this is really silly, there are lots of them still around. My HP-46 is a *much* rarer beast. (I've got 11C, 15C, 16C, 18BII, 19C, 21, 25, 32E, 34C, 35, 41C, 45, 46, 48SX, 55, 65, 67, 80, 97 - from memory, it's a while since I've revisited the collection.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Somewhere buried away I have a circular slide rule. Pretty neat design actually: concentric freewheeling disks and a transparent pointer so you don't lose your place. The pieces all stay together nicely, rather than having a slider shoot off one end or the other and get lost.
You're using her as bait, Master!
Once, I asked one of my instructors about their policy regarding programmable calculators and exams. He said if one understands a concept well enough to program it into a calculator, then one's grasp of that concept is such that the presence or absence of a programmable calculator isn't going to make a great deal of difference. I thought that was a cool attitude.
You're using her as bait, Master!
Yup, I still have the simple slide rule I had for freshman year back in Engineering school. Also have my dad's HP-35 up in storage, although it needs a battery.
Hi everybody. My name is Mike, and I'm a geek.
What are you talking about? You will get four significant digits after the decimal point on a calculator as you very well should. It is amusing that people rant about other people being ignorant only to demonstrate their own ignorance.
Obviously you are not using Word to post this.
Back durring the last century, this was an on going joke. when all the clocks rolled over we'd be back on mylar. hold on. the group i was working with (at boeing) was still using mylar/pens (in 1999). enjoy http://pfrostie.freeservers.com/cgi-bin/i/cad-tast rafy/cad.screen.jpg
Chalk up another one for science fiction. I read a story years ago about the only man left on Earth who knew how to multiply and divide without a calculator. He was (in the story) co-opted by the Pentagon and became a secret weapon
That's Isaac Asimov's "The Feeling of Power". It's in some of his antologies.
I still have a K&E Deci-Lon, with leather holster, but haven't used it in years.
Um... I don't think any good geek needs help finding the square root of 144 or the value of 2-to-the-10.
MyopicProwls
MyopicProwls
My homepage
So much of fast calculation is just knowing useful transforms (e.g. Pi seconds is a nanocentury.)
This is an indication of a much larger problem we have with eduction in America. We are taught to USE things, not to UNDERSTAND things. In my NOT so humble opinion computers have no place in education before graduate school, unless they are taught as a subject in and of themselves, not as a substitute for thinking. In this I count TI and HP calculators as computers, how be it small and not really general purpose computers.
I am of this opinion for the simple reason that I have fallen into that trap. I did not have any experience of any note with computers before college, except for one programming class in high school where we used rather pathetic machines at school to work. We had no computer at home except a dedicated purpose word processor. My calculator was not capable of symbolic integration or any of the other nifty tricks that the 89 and 92 are capable of. EVEN SO, the calculator could do logs, roots, and other things that I still have no good intutitive feel for. We need to be less concerned with speed in our teaching and mroe concerned with quality. Basic principles and techniques that have been really learned, not just memorized for a test and forgotten, will be of far more use than quickly picking up a broad survey of concepts.
Students, most of them, don't really want to work hard. It's just not fun. That's where teachers and yes PARENTS need to impose a little disicipline. Not too much, because then it is only the threat of the whip which drives the kid and as soon as the whip is gone (college) the effort goes too. But external disicipline is extremely important in the early years. Just be sure that real learning takes place, and real benefits occur. And show the kid what these benefits are. Don't just say "It'll be of use to you in the future." That's fine for you, but a young kid has no concept of his future. He doesn't see the impact of the past on his present, because he hasn't had enought experience to note cause and effect in his own personal life. Show him/her what they've learned, be excited about it, and if they ask what good it is TELL them. Explain to them about the importance of understanding what's going on around you. Explain to them what science, engineering, and other mathematical endevours mean to their future. Don't assume they won't understand. Just be patient, don't underestimate them, and don't overestimate them. Encourage questions. Never belittle a child or scold him for asking a quetion again and again - if he/she really doesn't understand, you WANT them to keep asking rather than surrender to ignorance.
There is a stigma in American society that if you don't advance a grade each year, you are stupid and behind. Behind in what way? I'd say if you falsly promote a student up a grade they'll be behind all their life, not just a year. Yes, social pressures can be cruel. I've lived through being the oddball and nerdy one all my life, and been shunned and made fun of. But you at least learn when to listen to people and when not to. A useful trick, when you deal with hostile people out in the real world.
Actually, I dislike the use of the phrase "the real world" when applied to the world outside school. For a child, the school world can be horribly real. They are trapped there. All too often, real work ethic is ridiculed, and they get mixed messages from all sides. Parents are essential to provide a clear signal, but even they can do nothing when a student is on the playground being shunned.
I am becoming a huge supporter of home schooling. Have activities where childern interact with each other, but keep learning between the parent and child. Both people involved are thus committed to what needs to be done, and the child can work at his/her pace, whether or not that is faster or slower than average. Also, the parent can then make sure that real understanding and absorption are taking placce, not just memorizing.
And also at home, you can keep them free of electronic aids. I have no problem with computers being TAUGHT in education, but I have a big problem with them being USED in education. If schools want to teach computers, they should teach what makes them work, the history of computers, programming languages, and other basics. If they want to teach how to use computers, I have to pieces of advice. Do not teach any math, spelling or other "educational tool" software until college at the earliest, and do not teach just one system. Teach them to be flexible computer users. Explain how a computer virus works, why they need to worry about them, and how to think about security. Teach them the difference between OS and application, and introduce them to all kinds of both. Hard, you'd better believe it. But very much worthwhile.
I would dearly love to see slide rules come back as a tool in teaching. An intuitive understanding of the world is where fundamental breakthroughs come from. It's also a great source of pride and confidence. Slide rules help build intuition, because the user is involved with the process of solveing. A calculator has none of that.
It is probably too late for me - I doubt I will ever develop the intuitive grasp of the world that the great scientists of old had. Indeed, I seriously doubt most people who have let machines do any significant part of their thinking will. Has anyone noticed how large the precentage of foreign nationals is in our highest education setting, graduate school? So few Americans are there. We just don't have the interest, or the intuition, or the training to want to do it. We pride ourselves on being advanced, but the people responsible for so many of those advances used so many simple tools to learn, REALLY learn, the basics. No computers, no calculators. Pencil and paper, and maybe a slide rule. Basics students don't need more than three sig figs - they are learning BASICS.
Pardon the rant. But this is a serious problem. I think home schooling may become more and more the way to really teach students. Make learning a life long excitement, not something to finish and then do something else. We push too hard, too fast. We burn out. I know what that is too. We need to question both our means, and our ends. I pray that someday we will.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
How do you transmit morse code by banging a pipe? Dit's and Dah's are distinguished from each other by the length of the pulse right? By banging on something you can only affect the time between pulses, not the length.
makes me feel old. My daughter just turned 21, my slide rules are older than her.
I've got two Picketts. Same as used on Apollo 13. One to go in my pocket protector, on massive job in a holster to hang from my belt. The leather holster is worth more than most calculators these days. Slide rules were serious business back in the old days.
The Picketts are aluminum, but that was a considered a " new high tech" idea. Before that *Bamboo* was the considered the best material to make slide rules from. Used to have a bamboo K&E, and a circular Teledyne, but somebody with taste and no morals stole them.
KFG
I'll date myself, too. What the hell. I started college about 2 years after electronic calculators became staples. If I had to use a slide rule, it's very possible I would have chosen another profession altogether. The modern calculator heavily influenced my decision to attend an engineering school. I never had a shirt pocket protector. Well, I wore on to a Halloween party once. And I *never* hung my calculator case on my belt, although there certainly was a loop to do that for those so inclined. Back then being a geek wasn't too bad but you had to avoid the label "nerd" at all costs!
When one of my uncles learned where I was going to college, he was proud to give me a couple of slide-rules as a gift. I didn't have the heart to explain the paradigm shift to him, so I graciously accepted them and put them on a shelf in the basement. I never used them. My first trip to the campus bookstore was an eye-opener. Formerly very expensive slide-rules that had sold for hundreds of dollars only a year before were discounted to $15.
Maybe the manufacturers should have sued TI and HP for denying them their revenue stream. Tsk, tsk, if only they had been prescient enough to patent numbers.
When I was growing up, I had a set of encyclopedias that had been my mom's when she was growing up. It was called Our Wonderful World, and was published in 1953 or so. (If anyone knows where to get a set, leave a note -- my parents sold them...grr.) It was a great set of books, but the technology was pretty out of date. Between that and the old, old selection of books on science in the libraries of the towns I grew up in, I was forever frustrated that I couldn't find a Foobly67 vacuum tube to build a radio with.
One of the things I read about was how to use a slide rule; that and all the slipstick references (paging Dr. Freud!) in Heinlein made me lust after one. But where the hell to get them?
I ended making my own. Of course, I didn't know carpentry, so I made it from two strips of paper that I had carefully marked out on a sorta-logarithmic scale. It worked pretty well, considering that I guessed at where numbers like 3 and 5 should end up -- I was able to multiply 2 and 3 and come up with 6.3.
This was in high school, and a math teacher saw me demonstrating how to use a slide rule to (vastly interested, I'm sure) friends. He took pity on me, and gave me a couple that he had from the dark days before cheap Taiwanese pocket-sized calculators. I also got a copy of the manual that came with one of them -- they were complicated things! -- and learned about how to do roots, cube roots, sines and cosines. I got relatively accomplished (relatively meaning that any competition was at least ten hours drive away), and used it to discover a wonderful proof of Fermat's last theorem; unfortunately, my pen wouldn't write on the plastic of the slide rule and so it was lost.
I haven't got one now, but this makes me want to check out Ebay and get one. If Heinlein has taught me anything, it's "Keep It In The Family"^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H"Keep Your Slipstick Handy" -- you never know when civilization will collapse around you.
Carousel is a lie!
I had a professor in college who used to challenge students to contests doing calculations. He used a slide rule, and they could use whatever tool they wanted (they always used a calculator as far as I know).
Now, I had never even seen, let alone used, a slide rule before. However, this guy's fingers would fly over that thing. I can't remember him ever losing while I was there, but he said that he had been bested a few times. The funniest thing was that he was usually done by the time the poor kid had found the ln button on the calculator...
-------
"To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking: Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!"
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I won a slide rule in a math contest in high school (just after the earth cooled enough to crust over), along with a $100 savings bond. I still have the slide rule. Nice K&E.
I kept a little plastic 6" rule in my car to calculate my mpg up until about 6 years ago. On a particularly hot day that I didn't roll my windows down just a bit, it melted, and I haven't been able to find one to replace it. As near as I can tell, nobody makes them anymore.
I still have my circular rule that I got for use in private pilot ground school. I guess if I ever fly again, I would still use it. (Flying is time consuming and expensive. When I have the money, I don't have the time, and when I have the time, I don't have the money.)
Concealed Handgun License Courses in Plano, Texas
I continued to use my slide rule well into the 1970s (even for things like compound interest calculations). I haven't used it in the last 25 years, of course.
Perhaps in the US, they do not teach or use morse code. But it is still the a fantastically efficient way to communicate, in terms of power usage bandwidth.
A very simple homebuilt transmitter can send an intelligible signal around the world, with an output power of perhaps 1 watt.
Got no transmitter? Use a heliograph. Or bang a pipe. Flash your headlights, whatever...
I may be missing something but x.xx and y.yy WILL result in an answer of the form zz.zzzz
The Curta is a hand-held mechanical calculator made in Liechtenstein between the end of WWII and the 1970's. It's really cool. See http://curta.org
My watch has an E6B built in! See Navitimer image
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck load of tapes
I don't know where you got your information on when students in the US first start using logarithms, but for me it was my sophmore year of high school during algebra II. We had used logs before but hadn't really developed any understanding until then. As far as calculus I didn't take calculus until my freshman year of college. For the placement exam, logarithms were pretty much the only thing I used to solve the problems. They are so handy in simplifying exponentional functions.
What do you get when you integrate (1/cabin)? Natural Log Cabin, lame math joke from my Calc II prof.
I/O, I/O, its off to disk I go, with a read and a write, and a bit and a byte, I/O, I/O, I/O, I/O
I'm only a little older than you (21) and I have a slide rule. It was my mother's back when she was a physics major in colelge. I've even used it to take a physics exam in college. (I forgot my calculator.) I highly recommend that you find one and learn to use it. They are VERY easy to use, and very useful.
Actually, pretty much the same case here, except I don't know how to use it. I got one from my father a couple of years ago and have been searching for directions since then. My father doesn't remember how to use it very well, and no one else I know seems to know how either. I'm still interested in learning how to use it, anyone know of a good set of directions somewhere? Or do any good books on this exist?
I still use my E6-B (manual one) rather than an electronic one or a GPS for figuring time/distance problems - it's just so much faster. Batteries never go dead either!
I'm not some old timer either, I'm not even 30 yet and I've only been flying for 4 years. I do have a GPS (it's nice to have the HSI display when flying IFR), but a mechanical E6B is still a very useful tool. I upgraded from a cheap card one to a nice aluminium one too ;-)
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
for most calculations I do, except when I try to use it to run Doom in deathmatch mode, then slide rules really bog down.
CmdrTaco: Jon, I am sorry, your services are no longer required...
JonKatz:What do you mean?
CT: Geeks are cool now, it says so here.
JonKatz: I can still... complain about corporations and stuff, can't I?
Michael:Sorry bro, that's my department now! HAHAHA!
JonKatz:This is just yet another manifestation of the classic post-modern urge to bury one's head in the sand, don't you see?
CT: (sighs slightly) Yes, that and MK-ULTRA manipulation, too, Jon...
--
--hongpong.com
-----
In mechanical drawing, you really learn how powerful not only slide rules, but normal, scaled (triangular) rulers can be. For example, to divide a distance into equal parts, just line up "0" with the beginning of the distance, then tilt the ruler down a ways. Make check marks at each centimeter/inch mark along the ruler's edge. Now take your T-square and triangle, line up the last mark with the end of your distance to establish your angle. Just slide your triangle over to each check mark and transpose that to your distance... Voila - evenly broken up along it's length into as many parts as you wanted... (It's easier to show this than explain it)
I agree with the whole thing about schools in america not teaching people to think, only trying to cram information into their heads so that they can pass a test and at least look like they can think. I am a Junior in high school now, and that is one of my biggest complaints. School is just attempted force-feeding of information, and it'll never work correctly. I personally see no problem with using calculators though, as long as they teach people to think for themselves first. They need to be taught that a calculator is only a tool, and only as infalliable as the person using it. Calculators aren't a magical answer machine, they just remove some of the tedium out of solving certain problems. I think that the main problem with the education system currently is that it doesn't teach thinking, and is in fact more oriented towards those who don't think, and just memorize equations without any thought as to how it works or why it works. I think that anyone who actually thinks in school will quickly find themselves bored. I also agree that it would be much better to privatize the education industry, but that is for a quite different reason.
Shit adds up at the bottom...
In eighth grade, perhaps because of my pestering interest, my pre-algebra teacher gave me a nice slide rule. I took it home, with the manual and carrying case it came with, and figured out how to do pretty basic math with it: multiplication, division. From what I understand, my uncle was quite the slide rule wizard back in the day. Supposedly people were able to crank on them as fast as others now use calculators. What an interesting progression, from abacus to adding machine to slide rule to calculators to computers....
End of Line
I know, the idea of a Flash animation of a slide rule is kinda strange. But hey, it's cool.
Why is it called COMMON sense when so few people have it?
Although I'm not adept enough with my Pickett slide rule to rely on it entirely (especially in classes where 3 decimal precision is considered essential, and time is limited), there is one situation where I have found it quite useful - classes where a calculator is not allowed. Most teachers only make such a restriction to keep students from using built-in cheat functions on some calculators to skip difficult problems, and having my slide rule helps me to do the simple math that I am supposed to have learned by now. Plus it's great for impressing girls.
I was going to put a sig here, but I had already submitted the message.
...who are too young to even remember what the things look like without going to look them up. :)
I'm 17, starting college this fall, and can honestly say that I have never had the experience of seeing someone have to use one outside of things like the movie Apollo 13...
Back in the waning days of the 20th century I keep a slide rule on my desk. When asked about it I said that this engineer was y2k compliant.
I am 20 and used one in high school for math too... (i guess people did think of me as a geek using a slide rule for the provincial (final) instead of the programmable graphing ones given... But I know and understand math better as a result of not using crutches (except for making games and chat programs to talk to somebody beside you on those TIs in chemistry class ;)
--------------------------------- Born Again Bourne Again Believer: New Life, GNU/Linux Be Free!
Keep your eyes peeled when browsing around jewelry stores; some mid- and high-range diver's watches have built-in circular log-log calculators around the bezel.
I'm sorry -- it's PILOT'S WATCHES that have the rules.s ky/promaster_sky_thunderbirds.htm
http://www.citizen.com.hk/eng/products/promaster/
In 1981 I remember being in the ISU campus bookstore, Ames, Iowa looking at a card table staked high with brand new K+E slide rules for a closeout price of $ 2.00. And to this day I just kick myself for not stocking up.
These rules had bamboo wood slides and an onion paper manual tucked into the box. Of course these rules resided inside a spiffy black leather holster. As a kid I can remember the smell of the leather when Dad showed me his K+E slide rule.
We use a tool called an E6B, invented originally (I think) by the army, which has a circular slide rule on one side of it.
The circular slide rule is pre-marked with conversions that are interested to pilots, such as gallons/gas->pounds and gallons/oil->pounds, and it it frequently used (in flight, with one hand) for computing distance covered.
There's a tons of other conversions, and of course, you can do any other mathematical operation that a slide rule can do.
Aviators are the only people I know who still use these slide rules -- but every student pilot where I flew was issued one and had to use it for the examinations.
Mumbly Joe
It might also be interesting, while conducting a dig for slide rules, to conduct a dig for the first time the subject of the archaeology of slide rules came up on Usenet. Should be early '80s net.misc, or so. There could be a whole taxonomy of wistful ruminations on the slipstick. The Well, CompuServe, in fact any BBS whose archives survive in paleontological context...
groups.google.com would be kind of useless. dejanews was kind of useless, too. They don't go back far enough. I guess you'd have to start the "recorded history" of the net somewhere around 1990.
--Blair
I think that it is good for people to still practice using the slide rule, it might help solving some problem down the road just like people who learn Latin can understand some words in an unknown language.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
Being a little over average recommeded weigth I use one to calculate the energy contribution from fat in foods in the supermarket. It is to nifty little paperwheels with logaritmic scales joined by a clip, and given away for free. If it wasn't for my granddad giving me a sliderule back when I was playing with Lego for fun, I wouldn't have recogniced this lowtech paper-wheel as a modern incarnation of a sliderule.
So, even now people who wouldn't know a logaritm even if they saw one, are using sliderule for everyday lowtech tasks.
Yes indeed. Actually, I've become so lost in the binary world that I frequently find myself doing the everyday calculations everyone does when shopping or bill-paying by converting to hexadecimal first. Also, I can quickly calculate 15% of anything in microseconds, from tipping. It's a trivial calculation, of course, however I do it so frequently that I developed a shortcut nonetheless (divide by ten and add half the result).
I think the basic lesson is that when we do anything often enough, we notice patterns that are otherwise invisible. The shortcuts usually seem to be simply repeating a pattern. The fact that today's generation doesn't know how to pull old standard math-tricks isn't a sign that they're supider or even that anything's been lost. It's a sign that the relevent patterns have changed. Let's see Mr. Feynman quickly normalize a segmented pointer!!
Oh, and here's a non-mathematical example of repetition leading to finding hidden patterns: music. Good music reveals intricacies which are completely invisible until you've listened to it a number of times, and learned the pattern.
> 6/7 to three sig figs. Answer is immediate if the useful 7*11*13==1001 has been memorized. Actually, there's an easier way to figure out any fraction of 7 to as many places of accuracy as you want. It turns out that all fractions of 7 have the repeating pattern 142857. So to calculate, say, 6/7, you'd only need to calculate the first digit, 8, and follow the pattern: 6/7 = .857 142857 ...
I still miss the -analog flag to xcalc. Under the X window system, if you run "xclock -digital" you get a digital clock, while "xclock -analog" gives you an analog clock. The command "xcalc" gives you a calaculator. Long ago some sneaky individual programmed it so "xcalc -analog" would give you a working slide rule. This feature is not in current version, but I wish it would make a comeback.
Where else can one find such obscure items, but good old eBay?
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
I agree with all of you that say that "understanding" is the real goal of education. Whether you call it critical thinking, synthesis, problem solving, or whatever, we're all trying to get kids to understand what they are doing rather than simply regurgitating the answers that we want from them. I'm talking about k-12 because the post I was replying to above stated that computers shouldn't even be introduced, except for computer theory and technology per se, until college. The point I'm trying to make is that computer skills are essential (if you don't agree with that then don't use a computer to respond to me) and schools are expected to produce technologically literate graduates, so that means that something has to be deleted from the curriculum to make room for the new material. The most obvious choice of what to delete is anything that is obsolete. Sliderules are obsolete, obviously, but there are other things that are de facto obsolete, but that hang on in the curriculum forever even though they will never be used in the real world by real people who are not mathemeticians or engineers. Yes, it is important to teach an understanding of math concepts, but does it really matter to an employer if a person can use a pencil and paper to find a square root? For most people in most jobs today, it doesn't matter how you get the answer as long as you get it. The real skill that employers need is the ability to APPLY math concepts. What I have found very frustrating is that many students who can add and subtract fractions in their heads cannot read a ruler in shop class because they cannot make the connection between fractions in their math book and the real world fractions on the rule. Same thing with finding dimensions of right triangles or applying geometry concepts to CAD drawings. Real understanding for most people does not come from doing math problems on paper, it comes from applying concepts to real world situations. It is my humble opinion that we should aim to teach application rather than theory, because it is from applying concepts that we actually come to understand concepts. When your CS profs said that the theory transcends technology, they were probably right, but MOST people don't understand from theory, they understand from application, and then they can relate theory to the applications they have made.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
Being a good writer, however, Heinlein finally managed somehow to get his point across, and I found that using a slide rule could give you a better uhmmm... let's say manipulation ability of the involved mathematical concepts. I even learnt to use an old one of my father, and loved the simplicity and power of the design. Somehow fascinating, but sorry no graphics display :o) So I kept with the HP. I remember going to math and physics exams with that 64K calculator filled up with all the theory, as text. I never had a teacher tech-savvy enough to know that calculators could carry full pages. That was a neat trick that slide rules still have to learn :o)
--
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
When teaching us logs in HS, My Math TeacherAir Force Flight Engineer had constructed a gaint slide rule and mounted on the wall where he would show the "real" way to do it. Just about cut of his thumb a few times though. I later used a slide rule when taking the math portions of the SAT (didn't help much, very simple).
"Get them before they get....
There's a great scene in Apollo 13 where a group at mission control frantically works with slide rules to calculate information before a computer on the ship is shut off.
Yes, that was a cool scene from a cool movie. However, the calculation they were performing was addition (from Lovell's line to the effect of "check my addition"), and I'm told that this is something slide rules can't calculate.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
There's this cool chapter in the book "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" in which the Nobel-laureate physicist Richard Feynman describes how he could calculate all kinds of complicated expressions in his head, simply by being very familiar with log tables and basic arithmetic. Unfortunately, in the calculator age this skill has been lost.
Example: Someone asks Feynman to calculate e to the power 3.3, and then to the 3:
"I happened to know three numbers -- the logarithm of 10 to the base e ... which is 2.3026 (so I knew that e to the 2.3 is very close to 10), and ... I knew the log of 2 to the base e, which is .69315 (so I also knew that e to the 0.7 is nearly equal to 2). I also knew e (to the 1), which is 2.71828. The first number they gave me was e to the 3.3, which is e to the 2.3 -- ten -- times e, or 27.18. I knew I couldn't do another one; that was sheer luck. But then the guy said e to the 3, that's e to the 2.3 times e to the .7, or 10 times 2. So I knew it was 20.something, and when they were worrying how I did it, I adjusted for the .693."
This is covered by fair use, I hope. But seriously - go get the book. It's an excellent read.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
However, different teachers have different policies about calculators. Some won't allow graphing calculators because they can store text (so can the old TI-68 scientific, but it doesn't look like a graphing calculator). Some will allow graphing calculators, but not ones the size of a VHS tape, complete with QWERTY keypad (even though the TI-89 has the same capabilities in a normal-looking design).
I'm fine with these policies for the most part, but it begins to irk me when, say, they won't allow calculators that can store text, but will allow a crib sheet. Or they won't allow a calculator that can do symbollic integration, but they will allow a book of integration tables. These sound an awful lot like "I won't allow technoligical aids because I don't understnad them."
When I find I have a particularly anal-retentive teacher, having my father's old sliderule handy is greaty for making a loud statement without saying a word, sticking out like a sore thumb in a room full of people pushing buttons. As long as you don't have notes written on it or anything, there's nothing they can say about you using it.
As for figuring out how to use it, my father had a pair of small books on their use, one of which was a book my grandfather got from the War Department while he was in the Navy. They're not hard to learn (easier to learn than most scientific calculators if you already know a thing or two about logarithms, as there's no different button layouts to get used to or Reverse Polish Notation), and I find they also help reinforce ideas about logarithms (you can SEE why log(a*b) = log(a) + log(b)).
While I'm not a rabid collecter with 300 sliderules (what a freak... now if he collected calculators... :) ), I'm glad I've got mine.
I have a TI 30 that sort of still works. Cool laser beam red leds...
Reading this article made me go dig out his trusty slide rule (now MY trusty slide rule.) All I ever did on it was learn to multiply...now I think I'll use the web to learn to use it properly.
Thanks for an interesting post.
And, all to often, understanding the way loses out to the easy way. We're not saying that slide rules should be taught over computers, we are saying that technological advances have had a negative impact on numeric literacy. We, as a society, will pay a price for that loss.
Of course, we really should teach computers over teh old ways. After all, who needs to be able to spell when there is spell check and why learn the rules of grammer and style when Word has a grammer and style checker as well? What's wrong with a world where MS, by default, dictates how the written word will appear? For my own enjoyment, I hope that the next Heinlein, Tolkien, or Jefferson amongst grows up as a Linux user.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Side note on foreign nationals in grad school:
The economic incentive for them is higher than for US citizens:
1. Earning a Phd or Masters in a technical subject does not generally provide the same bump in salary as a BS/BA does relative to a high school diploma. Forgoing an income and incurring debt does not produce the return needed to make it an attractive alternative to joining the workforce after undergrad. The payback for foreign studenst who return to their home country is probably greater than had they stopped at the undergrad level - whether in terms of prestige or pay.
2. Earning a PhD is one way to get the right to remaining and work in the US. While I would not ascribe that as the motivation for many foreign students, I have a number of friends who chose that route as a way to stay in this country.
I would bet the number of foreign students in trade schools (Law/Medical/Business) earning advanced degrees is smaller, in percentage terms, than in more scientific and technical programs. While some of this may be due to the difficulty in directly translating what is learned to a foreign s legal system or getting certification as an MD, those schools offer much higher returns for teh time and money spent. As a result, they have a much larger poll of US applicants and can fill their classes with them, unlike many traditional grad programs. Not surprisingly, business schools probabaly are the most aggressive of the trade schools in seeking foreign applicants, given the increasingly international scope of business.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The real beauty of using a sliderule was that you developed a feel for the numbers and what the results should be. After you had some experience estimating magnitude, if someone came up with some calculations, they'd either feel right or you'd get a gut feeling that something is wrong. I am still amazed that people can multiple two three digit numbers in the form of x.xx and y.yy) and come up with zz.zzzz or however many places their calculator displays. Or misplace a decimal point and not realize the result is wrong. People assume because the work has been done by a bunch of electrons that it must be right.
While I would not want to go back to only using a sliderule, the one thing that I did learn was how to estimate results in my head - a tool that has been very useful over the years.
Spreadsheets and handheld calculators are great - you can do more more quickly than you ever could with a slide rule.
You can also make bigger mistakes more often.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Perhaps not regularly, but... A couple of months ago my son came into my basement office with a question about his chemistry homework. After he'd gotten the concept straight, he asked if he could sit down at my (LinuxPPC) desktop machine and do the calculations. OK, fine. His next question was "Can you check my work?". He's now at my desktop, my laptop and my HP-42S are upstairs in my backpack, but I'm prepared for just such an emergency: my K+E Deci-Lon (1968 model) is on the shelf above the computer!
General aviation pilots are required to master and use a sort of slide rule called an E6B. E6Bs are usually round and are used to do heading and wind vector addition as well as time and fuel calculations. Its really stone age stuff, but it has the advantage that they work even after a lightning strike, assuming the pilot is still alive. And, to be quite honest, once you master the thing it really is faster than a handheld.
There's a great scene in Apollo 13 where a group at mission control frantically works with slide rules to calculate information before a computer on the ship is shut off. Going down the row seeing them raise their thumbs and say "checks out, flight" is one of the better scenes in the movie.
I'm a little young for the slide rule era; I have never owned or used one. I do remember the old HP-35 from when I was a kid. Thinking it was so powerful, a little handheld "computer".
Today, I still bring my HP-48GX to work. That's my modern-day slide rule.
I found this site months ago and find it to be a useful tool in TEACHING slide rule use. http://www.taswegian.com/SRTP/JavaSlide/javaslide. html
Wonderful thread.
;)
One thing I haven't see in this thread is mention of people still using pencil and paper for calculations! Even that seems to be a lost art. No, I am not talking about "high math", but the simple stuff (ya know, multiplication and division, etc.). At work when I do math on the back of paper (often the back of a napkin or some meeting handout) people look at me like I am some sort of Luddite. Yeah, I'll use xcalc, etc. if it is handy and I am in a hurry, but make a point out of using pencil and paper often enough that I don't lose the touch.
I often think when doing job interviews if I should give them ten math problems (not too hard, but hard enough to test their skills) and not let them use a calculator. This might separate the wheat from the chaff, but worry I might not find many under 35 pass
The only athletic sport I ever mastered was backgammon - Douglas William Jerrold
Here at the University of Missouri-Rolla the standard is the HP49G, but you can still buy slide rules in the bookstore. People get them all the time for graduation, but I've never once seen someone use one. When my dad graduated with a CS degree from here 15 years ago, he used an HP-35 -- it doesn't work any more, so he recently bought a 49G. -- Raise Up, Out of my office so I can blaze this L.
All serious users and hardcore geeks (PPC, etc.) will have a chance to get together on September 15 & 16, 2001 near O'Hare airport in Chicago. The event will be HHC 2001, the HP handheld users conference, and will be the last of its kind in the US until if and when HP brings out another new fancy handheld, which at the moment is very unlikely. All the details on the conference and preregistration for it are available on the official conference web page here.
Instead of laughing at the Ptolemaic view of the Solar System, just try to imagine figuring it out yourself from watching the skies night after night. Though wrong, it was a work of genius. Then think what you'll have to do if the power grid goes down for a week.
Watch who you call lame brain, cretin. Anyone who feels the need to post messages saying "who cares about that" is, in fact advocating the abandonment of knowledge about that item. If you don't care about something, all you need do is not reply.
I've got a sliderule to gauge the diameters of pipes. And waddayaknow it's great for cleaning pipes too! Nothing takes the resin out of my bowl like this sliderule.
I also got this screwdriver that i've had since i was eight years old, I'm now twentyfour and it's all worn down and ragged. However it now fits into any screws encountered in a computer cabinet (or almost any other screw in electronic devices)..
It's one of the few consumer-items I can honestly say I have put to full and good use.
-By attempting the impossible we can achieve the absurd..
Pilots use circular logarithmic calculating devices... that are basicly slide rules. they are cheep and made out of cardboard. used to calculate fuel and wind stuff. I guess the graphic designers use em for proportions... I just saw em in the art section of my school bookstore.
The sliderule had one huge advantage over the electronic calculator: you had to actually understand something about math to use it. My experience with my students now, (yes, I am THAT high school math teacher -- the one everybody tries not to get) is that few have any idea how those magic boxes work. Worse, most don't care. Incidently, if you think you got ridiculed for owning one as a guy, you should have tried it in the pre-feminist 60's as a girl.
I had to use a slide rule for Physics in grade 12. When I got to university I bought an HP-35 which is sitting in front of me and still works. The part that dies is the battery. Take the old battery out and pry apart the plastic frame holding the three battery cells. You can then go to RadioShack and get replacement batteries (a teensy bit of soldering required). Now I manage software projects that are cross-platform (UNIX, Windows, OS/390) relying on C++, SQL and Oracle, etc. (so old dogs can learn new tricks). As part of introducing co-op students, recent graduates and other people who don't actually know much about computers yet, how this business works. I show them slide rules and the HP-35. The object is to demonstrate that everything technical they learn (and in particular the tools) will quickly become obsolete. Try to learn in terms of the 'big picuture' and don't become fanatical on obscure technology. Tell me how your solutions (and methods) work with other operating systems. How does the solution relate to performance and other common constraints (like memory)? Slides rules aren't terribly useful today (except for pilots), but learning how to come up with quality estimates in a hurry is. And the HP-35 was an excellent demonsatration of reverse Polish notation (for you compiler builders).
I used one 'til I was 40, then bought an HP-45. Slipsticks don't mislead users about accuracy - if you multiply x.x by y.yy, your answer is accurate to z.z not z.zz - limited by the least accurate number you start with. I bought the 45 'cause I kept getting the decimal place wrong. In '89 I was working as a process engineer, making a static model of a pulp mill in a spreadsheet. I wanted to check a calculation before entering it - so I grabbed my HP15 - and found that its battery had died. I had my K&E at work - brought in to show a young person how it worked - so I grabbed that and verified my calculation. Wish I had a picture of that - sitting in front of a computer with the HP on desk and the 'stick in use.