July 09, 2004

How & Why a Slide Rule Works - What is a slide rule? Well it's a really useful tool used for calculations, to put it simply. Want more info? Wrap your frontal lobes around this lot, then.
posted by Nostrildamus 20 years ago
  • That was a pretty good explanation. I'm a math idiot, but even I grasped the basic concepts. Cool!
  • One of my fondest memories as a kid was my father's pocket protector - he was a R&D engineer - bulging with an assorment of pens and mechanical pencils as well as one tiny slide ruler with infinitesimally small labeling. He was prone to explain concepts in physics on cocktail napkins all the while crunching numbers with that little slide rule. I never did figure out how that thing worked but thanks to Nostrildamus I have no excuse to feign ignorance. :-p
  • Thank god cheap electronic calculators appeared before I took trig!
  • *embarrassingly baffled* god i'm such a math doofus.
  • I'm with you, SideDish. Bring on the essay questions!
  • ))) In the pre-calculator days, slide rules were a kind of status symbol for scientists. A really nice one was a beautiful wooden/ivory artefact: even if you had no idea how to use it, you couldn't help coveting it.
  • Ach, I still have several of mine kicking around the house, I think. But I don't use 'em. I don't bother looking for 'em. There's reason I don't. Nostalgia for some fancied past can blind ye to the fact a calculator works much more accurately and quickly, and is often cheaper, too, than these old and sometimes exasperating relics.
  • Oh, this makes me feel old. I still have a wood slide rule (rummages around in desk) right here, bought... well, bought before most present were born. Nostril, thanks for posting this! (trying to read directions and see if the old thing still works)
  • I've always wanted one of these to play with, one of the big ones. Good links, Uncle Nostril.
  • A slide rule is nothing more than a thin plastic idiot savant.
  • how is a slide rule different from an abacus?
  • I still have my slide rules (including a circular one)... somewhere. I loved 'em in my math-major days, but really, with all these here newfangled computing devices, who needs 'em?
  • I do like slide-rules, though much like Fes/SideDish et al., I can barely calculate the tip in a restaurant. I like them for the same reason I like astrolabes and Latin -- elegant engineering, lavish design, highly functional, but entirely obsolete.
  • For anyone who wants to play around with one: check out this nifty Java Slide Rule.
  • MonkeyFilter: nothing more than a thin plastic idiot savant.
  • I'm glad to see I'm not the only maths doofus around here.
  • Not only a language, but math?? Languagehat intimidates the heck outta me. Thank god cheap electronic calculators appeared before I took trig! Steveno: In my day we weren't allowed to use calculators.* We couldn't afford them, either. They cost a shit-pot load and weighed about 86 pounds each. Ever so often some give-away will have a one ounce, palm-sized, solar powered calculator with a gizillion function buttons on it, and I have to be amazed at what most folks take for granted. * We used black chalk boards instead of white marker boards, and the snow was really deep uphill both ways. And we liked it that way!
  • Eh, I've got me a big fancy TI scientific calculator, and I still can't figure out how to make the bastard do antiderivatives.
  • On mine I think you can type something like int(function, variable), but it's been a while