I actually have owned and used slide rulers but instead of telling you my story I think I’m just going to give that prompt to ChatGPT to prepare a comment on my behalf.
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I’ve got two, a little 6” pocket ‘rule, and a big full-size one in a nice plastic case. They’re both 50-odd years old, I bought them when I was still at school, and I think they’re terrific things. Pity is, I was barely able to do more than a few basic functions with them, my mind just doesn’t really work with numbers - even with a calculator, I can never figure out how to do percentages, I think I may have a form of dyscalculia, I struggle with my memory for numbers, formulas, learned facts and procedures, probably operational dyscalculia. It’s a good thing I’ve never had a need for maths in any job I’ve ever had.
Now spelling and stuff like that has never been an issue - I basically taught myself to read by the time I was four or five, which came in handy when I started designing books and having to mark up manuscripts and proofread them and the typesetting.
Every cloud, etc.
I’ll have to dig out my big slide rule, it’s an intrinsically wonderful thing, even if I don’t understand it.
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I’d argue there being very few, there’s a lot more musicians and singer-songwriters around now, and the ability to remember both the music and lyrics to dozens of songs is a real gift - there’s a British artist by the name of Kae Tempest, I saw them do a set at Green Man Festival several years ago, their music is more spoken word over music, the songs more or less ran one into the other with barely a pause, and their ability to remember the words to all the songs in an hour and a half set with virtual no breaks left me awestruck, but that goes for singers who’ve been playing and singing for decades. It’s the one gift I’d love to have, along with the ability to sing in tune!
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careful. logs are sensitive about being used as tables
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Nice try, ChatGPT.
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This article is about 10 years too late. My father was an engineering student back in the 70s, and he remembers that around '74 when LCD personal calculators were first available. That year only a few of his fellow students had one, but they were at a huge advantage compared to their peers. Just one year later, any student that didn’t have a pocket calculator was a huge disadvantage compared to their peers. My parents were newlywed poor students, but they decided that buying a pocket calculator was a necessary expense for his career as an engineer.
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Don’t know what a slide rule is for.
But I do know one and one is two
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And on into the future, when even the space pirates will cling to their 'rules like their lives depend on it — because they do.
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I hope you don’t claim to be an A student.
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Wow, I need this.
I grew up in the era of slide rules, but never used one. A year ago I bought a couple of classics and learned how to do the basics (multiplication and division) and I felt like I did when I first made fire with bamboo.
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Honestly, though, some of these “panicked” statements have a point: an analogue tool lays out the logic in a way that a human brain can understand a bit more readily. I don’t think it really had a great detrimental effect on students’ understanding of math (though I’m an English teacher, myself) but I do know that the level of abstractions I had to incorporate in learning about logs and exponents and derivatives and such did make my young brain swim a bit. Maybe if I’d had to calculate them with an analogue tool, I might have a kinesthetic means of understanding them beyond the abstract?
We English teachers are currently panicking about ChatGPT (well, some of us are: my attitude hovers between dread and astonishment). To say, though, that all moral panics are inherently unfounded seems to miss the point: we gain a lot with technology, but we lose things too.
I mean, Plato pointed that out, didn’t he? Writing is a φάρμακον, a drug and a poison, for memory. So are calculators, So is AI. At what point does the drug overcome the poison? At what point is the poison in ascendence over the drug? Seems a thing we should be aware of.
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… along the lines of something I had to do with my first calculator (a gift from my parents who totally weren’t paying attention). No decimal point key. (see below) For the calc results only, you would press the arrow key to see whatever is to the right of the decimal point. So, when making entries, I’d enter in all the numbers (including whatever was to the right of the decimal point) and place the decimal point where it should be in my calc result. There were two other odd things about this calc: pressing certain (now long forgotten) keys would result in the display counting up… like a timer; and the display’s tubes which, when on long enough, would give off a very irritating and very, very high-pitched tone. I knew of no one else who had this little freak show of a calc… until about 15 years later when I saw someone in our bowling league use one of these for scoring.
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If it comes back with something about how to slide if the catcher blocks home plate, please let us know.
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Were slide rules much more of an American ‘thing’? I only ever used log books here in the UK and don’t recall ever seeing a slide rule in school (70s to 80s).
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Old enough that I spent a lot of time learning how to use them in my electronics course. For electrical calculations the accuracy is sufficient (3 decimal places). What it does teach you is how to estimate reasonable answers - if you come up with a capacitor of 58 Farads, you should realize something is wrong!
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And that’s why America went to the moon and Britain didn’t. Impeccable logic!
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Yes the math says this circuit card needs an electrolytic capacitor about the size of a dishwasher.
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