Worth

[the mingo]

There was a time, in writing this,
that my fingers would have been stained with ink
now such a thing is not possible
- push a few keys - it's antiseptic
costs me nothing but a few moments and no clean-up
things have been dropped on the ground
along the way not realizing their worth

[sasha]

I spent 4 yrs of university physics doing all of my calculations with a slide rule. Mind you, I'll never go back - but because of its limitations, you had to know to within a degree of magnitude what your answer was going to be - meaning you had to set up a computational chain so your answer would be some number between 0 and 10, times a power of 10. The slide rule would get you the first of those, but you were responsible for the second. If you made a mistake, it was usually pretty obvious. Punching a number into a calculator or spreadsheet diminishes that sense of number-feel, makes it harder to smell a mistake.

From "All Things Considered":

2014 10 22 (the Slide Rule).mp3

(3.73 MiB) Not downloaded yet

[beekaay]

the tools that forged us
slide rule, ink pen
manual typewriter
all began sliding away
with the Radio Shack TSR-80
is there anyone younger than 40
who even knows
what "slide rule" means?

[saw]

http://sliderules.lovett.com/toprules/s ... &text=POST VERSALOG SLIDE RULE, HOLSTER CASE, BELT CLIP, EXC &language=0

I went to an engineering high school ( prior to the military draft ) ....remember the holsters.....some kids hung them from their belt ...like a weapon

[beekaay]

A joke that went around in my college days: Did you hear about the constipated engineering professor? He worked it out on a slide rule (snicker).

Tell that one to a college kid today and see if he gets it...