[HN Gopher] Illustrated Self-Guided Course On How To Use The Sli...
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Illustrated Self-Guided Course On How To Use The Slide Rule
Author : ngram
Score : 286 points
Date : 2020-08-02 12:44 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sliderulemuseum.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sliderulemuseum.com)
| wykyee wrote:
| ssadada
| [deleted]
| ogogmad wrote:
| Also check out the quarter-square method and prosthaphaeresis.
| ghaff wrote:
| Slide rules to calculators was an incredibly fast technology
| transition for the sort of people who would have been using slide
| rules in the first place.
|
| A 5-function calculator was about $100 in 1974 (so about $350 in
| current dollars) and an HP scientific calculator was 3 or 4x as
| much. By about the next year, a TI scientific calculator was
| about the same and by a year or two later you could get an HP--
| which was the gold standard for about the same amount.
|
| And that was around the price point where making them not just OK
| to use but mandatory was reasonable at least in higher ed. I was
| one of the first classes in college where calculators were the
| norm and slide rules were maybe something you brought for backup
| at exams. (Calculators were still LEDs so you had to keep them
| charged.)
| code4tee wrote:
| The "E6B Flight Computer" is a slide rule designed to perform
| various navigation calculations and is still a part of flight
| training for many pilots today. Once mastering it the old way
| student pilots are then allowed to use electronic versions or
| iPad apps that do all the calculations instantly.
| Bloggerzune wrote:
| A well-written and illustrated explanation like this one? I can't
| imagine preferring a video unless someone just wants some
| background noise and they don't really care about understanding
| the subject. https://www.bloggerzune.com/2019/10/a-bloggers-big-
| mistakes-...
| surajs wrote:
| how eccentric! would much rather prefer a yt vid / tutorial pls.
| toolslive wrote:
| I think the preference is age related: Personally I prefer text
| over video, as I can process it at my speed, while with video
| I'm limited to the speed with which it's explained.
|
| My children all seem to prefer video.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > I think the preference is age related: Personally I prefer
| text over video, as I can process it at my speed, while with
| video I'm limited to the speed with which it's explained.
|
| > My children all seem to prefer video.
|
| When I ask for text transcripts of our training videos, in
| place of having to sit through 20 minutes of poorly acted out
| skits (that, re-certification being a periodic thing, I have
| sat through some 5 or 6 times already in my 10 years on the
| job), I am always told "but people enjoy the videos"--as if
| providing transcripts were somehow exclusive of providing
| videos.
| ghaff wrote:
| You're almost certainly right. I _hate_ searching for info on
| something that could be easily explained in a paragraph and
| maybe a screenshot and instead I have to watch through some
| video--usually with an ad. I confess that I really resist
| making videos of things unless I have no choice but I know a
| lot of people prefer them.
|
| A well-written and illustrated explanation like this one? I
| can't imagine preferring a video unless someone just wants
| some background noise and they don't really care about
| understanding the subject.
| TallGuyShort wrote:
| Such tutorials are readily findable by searching for "slide
| rule tutorial" on YouTube.
| watersb wrote:
| I love playing with slide rules because it wraps my brain into
| using logarithms everywhere.
|
| The game of Go also redecorates my thinking, in a way I cannot
| put into words.
|
| Slide rules!
| dylan604 wrote:
| One of my favorite scenes in "Apollo 13" has a CO2 hazy Jim
| Lovell asking Houston to double check his math, and it cuts to a
| room full of engineers as they all grab their slide rules to
| calculate the answers Jim had just done in his head/scratch pad.
| [deleted]
| bregma wrote:
| When I was in university, if you forgot your slide rule at an
| exam they kindly had a supply of log tables you could pick up
| from the proctor.
| stblack wrote:
| One of the nicest things about a slide rule is, you can easily
| see the sensitivity of the result to variations of your last
| input.
|
| With a calculator, you get precision. With a slide rule, you get
| a value and its sensitivity.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I'm old enough that I had a slide rule when I was in school.
| Everyone did. They were built in to our pencil boxes.
|
| Most of us didn't use them, except the fancy-pantses who also
| insisted on using mechanical pencils. But we all knew how to use
| them.
|
| I'm graybeard enough that even through college, electric
| calculators were prohibited in class because they would give you
| answers without helping you understand the problem.
| qrbLPHiKpiux wrote:
| > answers without helping you understand the problem
|
| This is my problem with common core math. It shows how to get
| to an answer, but I feel it bypasses fundamental understanding
| on why the answer is what it is.
| analog31 wrote:
| "Common core" can mean different things to different people.
| When my kids were in grade school, I found that a few states
| have put their common core standards in fairly readable form.
| My impression is that common core is remarkably similar to
| what my siblings and I learned in K-12 math class. It
| actually led me to wonder what all of the fuss is about.
|
| The main thing that seems to be lacking in K-12 math today,
| is proofs. Those were my favorite part of math.
|
| With that said, K-12 math teaching in my generation wasn't
| all that successful.
| metiscus wrote:
| I feel that common core focuses more on teaching the various
| methods than embracing the idea that correct answers and
| understanding are largely what matter rather than any
| specific method.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > correct answers and understanding
|
| It's natural to lump these together as if they are a unit,
| but I think it's important to be explicit about the fact
| (which of course you know) that they are all too easily
| separable: it is incredibly easy, given sufficiently
| powerful tools, to get correct answers with little to no
| understanding. True understanding (not just "oh, I think I
| get it") that doesn't help to get answers is not nearly as
| common, but of course it exists, too.
| metiscus wrote:
| Yes I totally agree with your sentiment that it is
| vitally important to separate the correct answer from the
| method by which it is achieved. Honestly understanding
| mathematics is more important at some level than getting
| the right answer to a particular problem. That's the
| whole point, once you understand the grammar and
| vocabulary of mathematical thinking you can attempt to
| solve problems that are totally unrelated to things you
| know and still sometimes get useful results. The
| overwhelming question of the ages is how do you teach
| with that goal in mind and take account of all of the
| different learning pathologies while doing it in a
| universally accessible and measurable way. I think the
| problem is intractable as it is currently being
| approached.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's hardly a new thing with common core. See Tom
| Lehrer's "The New Math."
|
| "...But in the new approach, As you know, the important
| thing is to understand what you're doing, Rather than to
| get the right answer."
| metiscus wrote:
| Interestingly that song is apparently about the first
| time they tried to massively redesign the mathematics
| curriculum based on on fuzzy math that we were falling
| behind the Soviets or whatever. My parents tell me they
| rebased around set theory early etc but it foundered on
| nearly the same rocks that common core mathematics is now
| - teacher must be well educated in the pedagogical
| paradigm and fully understand it. E.g. you can't just
| take the same set of teachers from math v1.2.1 and slam
| them into math v2.1.0 or whatever without significant
| issues the two approaches are not abi compatible. That's
| why in my with opinion common core we are seeing teachers
| test finding answers via method 1 specifically or method
| 2 specifically rather than encouraging the use of either
| to get a correct answer by an understood method. /rant
| ghaff wrote:
| That all sounds about right. The song was from around the
| time I was in elementary school.
|
| I suspect that part of the problem is that teaching math
| concepts is at least somewhat orthogonal to drilling kids
| on being able to perform basic arithmetic operations
| fluently. Of course, these days I assume at least some of
| the debate probably gets into the fact that being able to
| do, say, long division quickly has about the same utility
| as learning Palmer script.
| metiscus wrote:
| I graduated in 2009 and in my engineering courses calculators
| were disallowed for similar reasons. I have found that courses
| that disallow calculators generally have the problems set up in
| a more elegant manner. E.g done properly the results end up in
| whole numbers or radicalize well rather than just an incoherent
| string of decimals. Courses that were focused on physical
| phenomenon like device electronics allowed calculator use
| because multiplying with Planck's constant by hand gets old
| quickly.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Alas! No specific mention of the circular slide rule [0]. I have
| one in my desk drawer that I inherited from my dad - who used it
| in the 1970s to confirm his hip hacker credentials to his
| colleagues (they were building the control circuits for early
| radio-therapy machines in a cancer research institute).
|
| [0] https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-
| groups/sli...
| psim1 wrote:
| Still very much in use: the E6B!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E6B
| analog31 wrote:
| I was curious about circular slide rules, and found one on eBay
| for a few bucks, so what the heck. It turned out that it was a
| give-away from a company that used to be in my town, so I ended
| up having a nice conversation with the seller about his history
| with the company and so forth. He was a long retired engineer.
|
| Anyway, I started playing with ratios, and noticed that the
| thing is inaccurate! Further inspection and hypothesizing led
| me to discover that the scales were not printed concentrically
| with the mechanism. It's very slight, and not critical to my
| work in any way, so I treat it as part of the learning
| experience.
| dctoedt wrote:
| My dad was a USAF fighter pilot; he kept his in-flight circular
| slide rule around for years. Unfortunately I didn't see it
| around when clearing out the house out after he and my mother
| died; I know I'd have kept it (because I've still got my yellow
| Pickett aluminum Model N-500-ES, (c) 1962).
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Circular slide rules tend to have smaller scales which may be
| harder to read but being circular has a great advantage. Look
| at how much effort in the OP is devoted to cases where the
| answer would ordinarily be off the end of the scale.
| xenocyon wrote:
| As someone who grew up in India in the 20th century: slide rules
| are unfamiliar, but we used log tables (calculators of any kind
| were prohibited through high school and standardized tests). For
| those unfamiliar, log tables serve to replace
| multiplication/division of floating-point numbers with
| addition/subtraction instead, making scientific computation a lot
| easier.
|
| The main benefit of introducing this friction, rather than
| allowing calculators, is that it (a) encourages one to do simple
| calculations by hand, and (b) gets one in the habit of quickly
| double checking that log-table-based results fall in the correct
| ballpark. Calculators induce a sort of mindlessness where glaring
| orders-of-magnitude errors pass us by since we expect the machine
| to get it right.
|
| With all that said, I don't know that I would recommend the use
| of log tables to high schoolers in the 21st century. That effort
| might be better utilized on more pressing needs e.g. statistical
| literacy. Many folks (including me) got entirely through STEM-
| focused high school knowing not even the slightest basics of
| statistical inference or causality.
| metiscus wrote:
| I think that learning how to use a log table might cement
| certain relationships for more advanced students. But I do
| agree that in general there are probably better uses of one's
| time than to teach them as a first class citizen.
| derekp7 wrote:
| One under-appreciated aspect of a slide rule, is for instantly
| seeing fraction reductions at a glance. For example, lets say I
| want to find out what aspect ratio a given screen resolution is
| at. I can set that resolution as a ratio on the slide rule's C/D
| scales (i.e., 1680x1050 becomes 1.68 one C, lined up with 1.05 on
| D. Then I glance over, and see immediately that is 16 x 10
| resolution.) If the value goes off the scales, look up to the
| CF/DF scales.
|
| This is also great when you have a bunch of resistors and
| capacitors, and you need to build a circuit where the two are at
| a particular ratio. Set the ratio you want, then you can take
| whatever resistor you have, and see if you have a cap that is
| "close enough" to what you need.
| aasasd wrote:
| Figuring out that 1680/1050 [?] 16/10 might not be the best
| example ;)
| derekp7 wrote:
| Yes, I was trying to think of something real quick, so I
| picked the resolution of my (older) monitor at work because
| it was simple. You caught me!
| myself248 wrote:
| Seems to me that you could place tickmarks or colored dots or
| something, at the E12 values along one scale (where resistors
| are usually binned) and the E6 values along the other scale
| (caps are usually sold in E6), and then it'd be an even quicker
| glance to see where two line up.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_series_of_preferred_numbers
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > This is also great when you have a bunch of resistors and
| capacitors
|
| Yes! This is the sort of thing my Dad used them for (see my
| other comment here for the context)
| kqr wrote:
| Also ratio multiplications, e.g. when increasing the amounts of
| ingredients in recipes to match a particular amount of
| something.
|
| So if the primary ingredient is chevre cheese, the recipe calls
| for 180 grams, but you can only buy it in 250 gram packages,
| you can set the slide rule to "180 over 250" and then just
| mechanically read off the proportionally correct amounts of all
| other ingredients.
|
| Slide rules are indispensable in the kitchen to me and I'm
| surprised they're not part of standard kitchen equipment like
| e.g. scales.
|
| Edit: Similarly, if the recipe is expressing ingredients in US
| units and you would want to know the international amounts, you
| can set the slide rule to the conversion ratio and again,
| mechanically read off the correct amounts as you go.
| gumby wrote:
| This is one advantage of the customary (English language non-
| metric) units: the common ones are full of rational factors
| (1/2, 2/3 etc) -- it's pretty easy to adjust a recipe to the
| number of people.
| supernova87a wrote:
| I think practice with a slide rule also gets you to sanity check
| your method and think whether the answer can be correct.
|
| Given how you could forget and inadvertently reverse the scales,
| etc, you have to think whether the answer you're getting makes
| sense by looking at the trend of the numbers. Plug and chug into
| a calculator takes some of that away.
| vilesolid wrote:
| See the 18 proven ways on how to make 10 dollars a day online
| (2020)? https://vilesolid.com/how-to-make-10-dollars-a-day/
| [deleted]
| ColinWright wrote:
| A few years ago I met Fred Haise Jr and got him to sign one of my
| Slide Rules. He was so excited to see it, took it from me, and
| started to show the event host how to use it!
|
| He asked me what I use to lubricate it, and when I said "Pencil
| graphite" he got even more excited. Apparently a lot of the other
| astronauts had used fancy light lubrication oils, but he always
| used a pencil and never had any problems.
|
| He was a lovely man, and it was fabulous to enthuse with him over
| this wonderful piece of technology.
| lokedhs wrote:
| I'm of the generation that missed out on slide rules by a decade
| or so. My parents had one thta i played with as a kid, and I
| learned to do multiplicication and division with it.
|
| I'd like to get one now, mainly for fun, but if you want to buy
| one on Ebay in good condition, you have to pay quite a bit of
| money.
| ghaff wrote:
| Plastic "student" slide rules are cheap on eBay. But, yes,
| quality K&E's etc. are expensive.
| dwheeler wrote:
| Quality K&E's were _never_ cheap :-).
| lokedhs wrote:
| Since this is something I want to keep on my desk, not only
| for decoration but for actually copute things if I'm bored, I
| really want tone of the nicer ones.
|
| It seems around 35 EUR is a normal price.
| ghaff wrote:
| Quality slide rules probably cost a lot more than that when
| they were still being manufactured :-)
| myself248 wrote:
| Seems to me that this is also a lovely use for a desktop laser
| cutter. Dig out a copy of Pynomo or something and make your own
| scales that suit whatever specialty application you have in
| mind.
| drfuchs wrote:
| Another great thing about slide rule days is that results are
| naturally constrained to 2 or 3 significant digits, so you'd
| never see nonsense like "The mountain is 10km high, or 32808.4ft"
| as if the 10km figure was accurate to 6 significant digits.
| INGELRII wrote:
| Unnecessary accuracy is technical incompetence.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think you mean precision in this case. If you're going to
| be all high and mighty you should probably get your facts
| correct.
| sirsar wrote:
| I still remember the day I found out the "98.6 degrees" human
| body temperature was just an oversignificant conversion from
| "about 37 C, or maybe lower."
| JadeNB wrote:
| > I still remember the day I found out the "98.6 degrees"
| human body temperature was just an oversignificant conversion
| from "about 37 C, or maybe lower."
|
| Really? According to Wikipedia, the Fahrenheit scale
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit#History) is about
| 18 years older than the Celsius scale
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius#History), and I'm
| surprised that human body temperature wasn't included as a
| calibration. (But of course the fact that I'm surprised by it
| doesn't mean it isn't true!)
| _underfl0w_ wrote:
| Could've sworn I remember hearing in grade school that one
| of then was actually calibrated with cow body temperatures.
| Don't remember which scale, though.
| cyphar wrote:
| Fahrenheit was initially intended to have 96degF be equal
| to body temperature (in fact it was one of the three fixed
| points in the temperature scale, designed to have 64 steps
| between the freezing point of water at 32degF and human
| body temperature).
|
| However after the introduction of Celcius, Fahrenheit was
| redefined slightly (with the freezing and boiling point of
| water being the fixed "nice" values for the scale -- to
| match the model used by Celcius) which resulted in human
| body temperature no longer having such a nice value. This
| also moved the 0degF value. So while technically Fahrenheit
| does predate Celcius and it did have a "nice" value for
| body temperature when invented, it was soon afterwards
| redefined such that arguably the value is just a conversion
| from Celcius.
|
| In short, you're both correct. :D
| folli wrote:
| Why did they come up with 96 instead of 100, a nice round
| number?
| JadeNB wrote:
| Sounds like the motivation was powers of 2, not 10.
| leetrout wrote:
| Circular slide rules are still used today in aviation in the form
| of the E6B flight computer.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E6B
| ghaff wrote:
| Back when slide rules were still widely used and even after
| calculators had recently come in, you also saw a lot of
| industry-specific cardboard sliding scales that were basically
| slide rules with different types of units.
| veddox wrote:
| Our math teacher, a former engineer, once brought his slide rule
| to class when we were in grade 9. He posed a problem and raced us
| to the solution, slide rule vs. calculators. He beat us all...
| dave_aiello wrote:
| In an era marked by renewed interest in vinyl records, shouldn't
| there also be a corresponding interest in slide rules?
| coldpie wrote:
| I dunno, man. I'm pretty well-versed in math and I find this
| page kind of baffling. I'm sure it's one of those things that
| is very easy to use once you learn it, but at least this
| introduction is very daunting. To do a basic multiplication
| (step 1 in the linked page) I need to use the C and D scales,
| each for two different purposes. Why not A and B? How do I
| remember it's C and D? Which part goes on C and which part goes
| on D? Then step 2 describes what to do if it goes off the edge
| of the scale, and it involves making an approximation. How do I
| know how accurate my approximation must be? Why is it to the
| tens digit? If I get larger numbers do I continue to use the
| tens digit, or some higher factor? We're only on step 2 and I'm
| already lost.
|
| This definitely looks like a great tool, and I'm kind of sad I
| don't have one or understand how it works, but this kind of
| complex learning and memorization up against dropping a needle
| on a record you like isn't really a great comparison.
| dwheeler wrote:
| Don't be fooled, slide rules are _really_ easy to use. It
| took me less than a minute to learn how to do multiplication,
| and I wasn 't an adult yet.
|
| The A/B/C/D names are from Amedee Mannheim, who in 1851
| designed the "modern" slide rule & give those scales those
| names. In practice, you normally just use the C & D scales
| when you want to multiply. Here's a history of the "cursor"
| on a slide rule, that also provides a clear history of the
| slide rule itself: https://www.nzeldes.com/HOC/Cursors.htm
|
| I've never had a _practical_ reason to use a slide rule over
| a calculator. But I 've had _fun_ with them, & that means
| something.
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of slide rules have a bunch of scales but there are
| only a few you routinely use. Using a slide rule is very easy
| to pick up. That said, you do need to handle the order of
| magnitudes mentally and precision is necessarily limited.
|
| And slide rules don't do addition or subtraction.
|
| So they were useful in the absence of calculators as a way to
| avoid using log and trig tables but you wouldn't
| realistically use them in place of calculators today. (But
| then I think vinyl records are pretty silly too; and I say
| that as someone who grew up with them and actually owns a
| turntable.)
| yuubi wrote:
| It works better if you know how the scales are constructed
| and get familiar with properties of logarithms (mainly
| variations on log ab = log a + log b)
|
| C and D are plain log scales, where one decade is the length
| of the rule. They're sort of the default scales to use.
|
| Multiplication is commutative, so you put either number on
| either scale. The important thing is that the distance from
| the left index of the scale is proportional to the log of the
| number (reading the scale as 1 to 10), so you want to arrange
| the scales to add the lengths corresponding to your numbers
| such that the lengths add up. (Or so that you subtract the
| length of the divisor from the dividend, if you're dividing).
|
| You can get by without the approximation if you're willing to
| set up the multiplication, see that the product is out there
| in thin air, then move the slide to put the right index where
| you originally put the left index. (3 times 5: on the d scale
| find 3 and put the left index of the C scale there; opposite
| 5 on the C scale read nothing because there's no D scale
| there; try again using the right index of the C scale, which
| is the same thing as having another copy of the D scale out
| there to the right where the air was).
|
| A and B are each 2 copies of a log scale. You can absolutely
| use the left side of A and B for your numbers to multiply,
| and the product will always be on the scale.
|
| People normally use(d?) C and D because the precision is
| better and because the rest of the scales (like the trig and
| log-log) are constructed to work with them.
| kqr wrote:
| Nit: while multiplication is commutative, the property you
| meant to use was symmetry. I'm sure it was a mistake and
| you know this, I'm just pointing it out to prevent
| confusion for others.
|
| Edit: s/competitive/commutative/
| yuubi wrote:
| Huh. I heard (US high school algebra in a recent
| unspecified century) the fact that ab=ba called "the
| commutative property of multiplication", and the
| "symmetric property of equality" meant a=b <=> b=a, and
| didn't run across anything later on (comp sci from a
| department of the engineering college rather than the
| math department) inconsistent with that. Symmetry sounds
| like a reasonable term for both, but it sounds like
| there's a distinction I don't get?
| aitchnyu wrote:
| 12 years back, I saw a site peddling a story about slide rules
| forgotten in a warehouse for 40 years, even apologizing for dog
| eared boxes. They said they promote skills athropied by
| calculators.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Fascinating near invisible yet very high abstraction.
| markbnj wrote:
| My Dad, an engineer for GM/Cadillac, gave my brother and I each a
| slide rule back in the 60's. I remember marveling at the
| precision of it, and I did learn to use it for some calculations,
| but not to a level that impressed him :).
| tzs wrote:
| One unexpected advantage in some circumstances of a slide rule
| over current portable computing devices is that it does not have
| memory.
|
| You are allowed to bring a calculator to ham radio license exams
| in the US, but you have to clear its memory (both data and
| program memory for programmable calculators) first. If the
| examiners aren't sure you have done so, they are supposed to
| disallow the calculator.
|
| Unlike many other standardized tests, there is no specific list
| of what calculators are allowed. I brought my HP-15C, but wasn't
| sure that the examiners would be familiar with it and so wasn't
| sure I'd be able to convince them that I had cleared it.
|
| I also brought a slide rule. That way if the examiners disallowed
| my HP-15C I'd still be covered.
|
| They did allow the HP-15C, and it turned out that even though I
| took all three exams (Technician, General, and Extra) that day, I
| only actually used the calculator once. The questions are all
| multiple choice, and there was only one where a quick mental
| approximation wasn't enough to identify the right answer.
| ssimpson wrote:
| I've been trying to figure out how to use my grandfathers
| Dietzgen Maniphase Multiplex Decimal Trigtype Log Log rule. I
| found the manual on this site! Very cool!
| wdb wrote:
| Cool, now I finally know how to use this rule that I got when me
| and my siblings were clearing up the family house after my
| parents passed away.
|
| It's really fascinating, I will show my nephews when I am back in
| the home country :)
|
| Thanks for posting!
| [deleted]
| philiplu wrote:
| What a blast from the past. I can draw a direct line from my
| encountering a slide rule to ending up as a programmer. I owe my
| career to that device.
|
| I was a nerdy 10 year old kid who liked doing arithmetic in 1970,
| but didn't know anything particularly advanced. I convinced my
| parents to get me a slide rule as a Christmas present that year;
| a basic white Post model 1447 - I know that because I'm looking
| at it right now. It's been in my desk drawer forever as I could
| never convince myself to throw it away, even though I've long
| since lost the sliding cursor.
|
| Anyway, I got the slide rule, had fun with basic
| multiplication/division, but didn't understand what the S, T, and
| L scales on the back were for. Sine/Tangent/Logarithm? What are
| those?
|
| Off to the library, where I picked up a Tutor-Text book [0] on
| trigonometry, discovered I'd better first learn some algebra,
| picked up another Tutor-Text book on that, and began a two-year
| tear teaching myself algebra to integral calculus. Which meant I
| tested out of a couple years of math in high school, ran out of
| courses to take, and in my junior year was allowed to walk to the
| local college to take 2nd year Calc classes.
|
| At that college, they started letting me play with the computers,
| both an IBM 5100 APL machine over one summer, and hands-on access
| to the IBM 11/30 clone minicomputer that was the main machine.
| The math prof pointed me at Knuth's "The Art of Computer
| Programming", and that began my transition from pure mathematics
| to computer programming/science instead. I even wrote a MIXAL
| assembler/MIX simulator for the minicomputer that the college
| ended up using to teach an assembly language course.
|
| So thank you, Post, Pickett, K&E! And Tutor-Text as well.
|
| [0]: https://gamebooks.org/Series/457/Show
| chongli wrote:
| I love your story. Thanks for sharing! I think we could have
| way more stories like this if we were able to provide more
| enriching environments for kids and properly nourish their
| curiosity. I think so many young kids love asking questions and
| the adults around them get fed up with the questions instead of
| engaging with them in the process of discovery.
| kqr wrote:
| Not to mention schools using grades, signed slips, and other
| extrinsic motivators to encourage conformity and obedience,
| all the while extinguishing any intrinsic motivation, like
| curiosity.
|
| I'm sure the way schools look made a lot of sense in the time
| of industrialisation and the manual labour of the factory
| worker, but it's crazy we still shape students by that mould
| when it's so far removed from the creative pursuits we expect
| them to go on later in life.
| gonzo wrote:
| "Signed slips"... our son turned 18 half-way through his
| senior year of high school. So I explained that he could
| now sign his own excuses for being tardy, and no actually
| explanation was required.
|
| "Please excuse <name>, I am tardy." <signature of name>"
| ezequiel-garzon wrote:
| Thanks for sharing such a wonderful story. Something tells me
| your career path wouldn't have changed significantly if you had
| never touched a slide rule, though :)
| geophile wrote:
| I went through a very similar evolution, starting with slide
| rules, at about the same time. You don't mention middle school
| and high school -- I was very fortunate in having access to
| Wang and Monroe programmable calculators, and then a PDP-8M.
|
| Still have a few slide rules, includingn Pickett and K&E.
| neilpanchal wrote:
| > So thank you, Post, Pickett, K&E! And Tutor-Text as well.
|
| I didn't even grow up in this era and I keep buying stuff from
| eBay purely out of fascination for old ways of doing things.
| These names on all kinds of things I have horded -
| architectural templates, drafting machine, cutting mat, compass
| set, lettering templates, etc.
|
| Thanks for sharing your story!
| gonzo wrote:
| Similar background story, I was 8 in 1970, and my father knew
| what a slide rule was, and how to use it, so I learned a bit of
| trig from him before repeatedly checking out a textbook on trig
| from the public library.
|
| True story: my son took an AP physics class in high school,
| (LASA) taught by sokeone with a PhD in physics. They had an
| oversized teaching sliderule hanging from the ceiling, where
| nobody could use it. It had become decoration, as nobody was
| left to teach with it.
|
| When I was at the school for a "meet your student's teachers"
| night, one of the other parents asked about the side rule.
| Instructor didn't know how it worked.
|
| So I explained it.
|
| My wife still has her grandfather's slide rules from when he
| was the state engineer in the 50s and 60s.
| philiplu wrote:
| I remember those large teaching slide-rules, but haven't seen
| one in decades. Great to know they still exist, if only as
| mysterious artifacts from the dark ages.
|
| Neither of my parents were mathematically inclined, but they
| were content to let me forage for information on my own, with
| lots of trips to the library. Amazing how clear are my
| 50-year-old memories of 10-year-old me sitting on the floor
| with a trig book, drawing random triangles on paper,
| measuring them as carefully as I could with ruler and
| protractor, and verifying the law of sines and cosines with
| paper and slide-rule. God, I was such a nerd. Paid off well
| in the end, though :-)
|
| Now I'm retired, and for fun, I work my way through the
| problems at Project Euler. Four years in, and only two more
| problems to go to hit 90% complete! It'll probably take me
| another year+ to finish them all (hopefully).
| thechao wrote:
| We end up doing a lot of back-of-the-envelope calculations
| for various odds-and-ends. I keep a 4' long teaching slide-
| rule next to my desk for this purpose. New employees are
| befuddled. Everyone else just accepts it as a fact-of-life
| when asking for my help.
| TallGuyShort wrote:
| Not in quite the same way, but I was inspired by watching
| Apollo 13 as a kid. I felt like the heroes were the engineers
| who could do the math and calculate the trajectories and work
| out the procedure for starting up the LM with low power. I was
| drawn to the engineering side of software by that. I keep an
| antique slide rule and some other old engineering instruments
| on my desk as a reminder of that inspiration.
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