Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Cheap Second Calculators For Tests?
Rich0 writes "I own an HP 48 calculator that I'm quite content with, but soon I'll need to take a certification exam where this calculator will not be welcome. I'm sure this is a common problem for those who own higher-end calculators. Sure, I could just buy a random $15 calculator with a few trig functions, but I was wondering who makes the best moderately-priced calculators for somebody who already has and appreciates a programmable calculator and just needs something simple. Bonus points if the calculator can handle polar vector arithmetic and unit conversions, but it has to be simple enough that virtually any exam would accept its use."
And a great engineer carries a slide rule, because batteries run out.
True story: I did well at MIT 30 years ago, partly because working with my dad's old circular slide rule gave me a fine appreciation for rounding erors, margins of error and orders of magnitude unavailable to my calculator using peers. But I almost failed the thermodynamics final because *so many* of the teaching assistants came over to wonder "what in the heck is that!!?" The professor had to chase them off so I could finish my work.
My calculator equipped peers also had a terrible, terrible habit of precalculating what their measurements should be in order to get the desired result. I almost came to blows with several of them over this, and the professor was *shocked* to find out that the excellent lab results people had been showing were mostly a matter of c students fudging their lab results to get the right measurements. It gave me a fine appreciation for insisting on seeing the original data.