When I was a motorcycle mechanic I had a circular slide rule, with a permanent mark at the coefficient for computing a catenoid, as I did a lot of 2-stroke exhaust systems. Some hilariously wrong, some which got me a reputation as a wizard. --dave On 6/1/23 18:08, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk wrote:
| From: Scott Allen via talk <talk@gtalug.org>
| I thought the circular ones were an interesting idea but I only had a | cheap plastic straight one. | https://www.sliderule.tokyo/products/detail.php?product_id=8
Yeah, I had a cheap one from Coles Book Store discount bin.
With a regular slide rule, you had to realize when to wrap around: 5 x 5 would go off the right end so you had to go left to 2.5 (and to increment the in your head expoent). With the circular slide rule, the wrapping was automatic but you still had to increment the exponent.
One of our classrooms had a very large demo slide rule. 7'? It was yellow so I think that it was a Pickett <https://dannychesnut.com/SlideRule/SlideRule.htm> That should have given 4 digits of accuracy
A colleague in the Computing Centre at Waterloo showed me a helical slide rule. It must have been something like this: http://retrocalculators.com/otis-king.htm The result is an extra digit of accuracy without being too large
| The year after I learned "slide rule" in high school, training was | dropped because calculators were becoming the norm.
Every new techology begets grumbles about what was lost.
- analogue leads to elegant, precise, timeless devices
- a slide rule forces you to have a feel for the answer. At a minimum, the power of 10.
- a 10-digit answer from a calculator makes you think you have the 10 digit answer. Almost nothing you measure (as opposed to count) has that much accuracy.
Me? I like discrete problems. Perect for digital computers. I have calculated precise and accurate numbers that are thousands of digits long.
Of course some have calculated millions of digits of the decimal representation of Pi. Not with a slide rule. --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
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