Slide ruler

Nikos said:
I picked up a slide ruler today in case the spaghetti hits the fan with an EMP or CMP and calculators don’t work. Still learning how to use it, but it is an interesting tool. To think we flew to the moon with equipment designed using a slide ruler.
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My Dad worked on a project for the X-15 and used a slide rule for the calculations. The SR-71 was also designed and built with slide rules.

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I have a few, never learned how to use them.

I’m a mechanical engineer, so I should. But then again… after all these years I’m not excited about it anymore…
 
I count myself lucky that I am of age that fell between a lots of technology in school. Calculators were available but they were not cheap. Teachers were constantly feuding over whether students should be allowed to use them. I was thinking even back then there would be few situations future generations wouldn't have access to computing of some kind (yes, learn + - * / and fractions...beyond that meh), that calculators would be smaller and cheaper so that almost anyone could have one.

So there was a course in 7th grade on how to use a slide rule I took. It's pretty cool concept. Was years before I learned the math behind how they work and then thought about the geniuses that came up with these things. People sometimes say we're "smarter" now than we were say 100 years ago. To that I reply that we have better technology but we're not "smarter"....then refer them to the obviously low-intelligence builders in Egypt.
 
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Nikos said:
I picked up a slide ruler today in case the spaghetti hits the fan with an EMP or CMP and calculators don’t work. Still learning how to use it, but it is an interesting tool. To think we flew to the moon with equipment designed using a slide ruler.
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Don't forget a Butlerian Jihad.
 
GL2020 said:
I count myself lucky that I am of age that fell between a lots of technology in school. Calculators were available but they were not cheap. Teachers were constantly feuding over whether students should be allowed to use them. I was thinking even back then there would be few situations future generations wouldn't have access to computing of some kind (yes, learn + - * / and fractions...beyond that meh), that calculators would be smarter and cheaper so that almost anyone could have one.

So there was a course in 7th grade on how to use a slide rule I took. It's pretty cool concept. Was years before I learned the math behind how they work and then thought about the geniuses that devised came up with these things. People sometimes say we're "smarter" now than we were say 100 years ago. To that I reply that we have better technology but we're not "smarter"....then refer them to the obviously low-intelligence builders in Egypt.
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As an engineer, if I’m stumped, I google it.

On my CAD software, I can use it the solve even the simplest thing.

Let’s say I do not know the decimal equivalent of 1/8”. I can type in 1/8 into the dimension field and it will give me .125.

I don’t need to know math anymore.
 
chris_1001 said:
As an engineer, if I’m stumped, I google it.

On my CAD software, I can use it the solve even the simplest thing.

Let’s say I do not know the decimal equivalent of 1/8”. I can type in 1/8 into the dimension field and it will give me .125.

I don’t need to know math anymore.
Click to expand...

I had to take stats in grad school. The professor was an old-skool stats geek who knew all the formulas. He was aware, however, that he was teaching a bunch of non-Math types, so on the first day he told us he'd be available in his office hours, where he'd be happy to discuss Pearson's R and shit like that for hours with anyone who came by.

"For the rest of you," he went on, "here's the deal. There's nothing those formulas can do that Microsoft Excel can't do faster and more accurately. And since you're only here to fulfill a requirement and not learn how to be actual mathematicians? I'll just teach you how to use the Excel spreadsheets to do correlations and stuff."

And that's exactly what he did.
 
GL2020 said:
People sometimes say we're "smarter" now than we were say 100 years ago. To that I reply that we have better technology but we're not "smarter"....then refer them to the obviously low-intelligence builders in Egypt.
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I think of this all the time when people say we're smarter today.

View: https://youtu.be/mRNX6XJOeGU


But with that, not all those slaves that built the pyramids were smart enough to engineer their construction.
In 1000 years there may be a new civilisation that takes over with different technologies and they may dig up an iPhone and think ... wow these people were so smart...not knowing the people who actually built them were literal slaves with one task to complete for that device to be made.
I don't think the Chinese guy who puts in the screws for the battery has an Einstein level iq.
 
chris_1001 said:
As an engineer, if I’m stumped, I google it.

On my CAD software, I can use it the solve even the simplest thing.

Let’s say I do not know the decimal equivalent of 1/8”. I can type in 1/8 into the dimension field and it will give me .125.

I don’t need to know math anymore.
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Yup I agree. But always good to have a backup.

You might not know off the top of your head, but you could do the actual division and come up with .125 in a bind
And now I need to add a couple fractions and find the mid point (wife like the pic in the middle of the wall), I'm reaching for a pencil
 
snax said:
I think of this all the time when people say we're smarter today.

View: https://youtu.be/mRNX6XJOeGU


But with that, not all those slaves that built the pyramids were smart enough to engineer their construction.
In 1000 years there may be a new civilisation that takes over with different technologies and they may dig up an iPhone and think ... wow these people were so smart...not knowing the people who actually built them were literal slaves with one task to complete for that device to be made.
I don't think the Chinese guy who puts in the screws for the battery has an Einstein level iq.
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Agreed, but my point was the most intelligent of today is not more intelligent of 500 years ago. He has access to more info, more history, better technology and research, but his ability to "reason" is no better than the old guy if he had the same tools available to him. I'm not even sure I'd go along with we have "more" smart people. I think we just know about more of them because our technology allows us to.
 
we used slide rules when i was a freshman in high school. issued one when we went to pick up our books for the year. like everything else, some people picked right up on it, i struggled with the damn thing.
 
GL2020 said:
Agreed, but my point was the most intelligent of today is not more intelligent of 500 years ago. He has access to more info, more history, better technology and research, but his ability to "reason" is no better than the old guy if he had the same tools available to him. I'm not even sure I'd go along with we have "more" smart people. I think we just know about more of them because our technology allows us to.
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I think we know less now.

Think of all the skills and knowledge our grandparents needed. Case in point: I inherited my grandma's old recipe book from when she was a little girl, so figure late 1920s or so. You open to the recipe for CHEESE, which people back then had to know how to make if they wanted it. She starts out with, "Place 1 1/2 gal thick clabber milk on stove where it will become very hot."

The recipe takes it for granted that you know what clabber milk is, how it's different from non-clabber milk, how to acquire 1.5 gallons of it, etc. Nobody today knows that anymore, and yet back then it was considered commonplace for a rural girl to know all that. The book is packed with recipes like that. Her recipe for Ice Cream (also not something she could buy) starts, "Cook a custard using 1 quart milk, egg..." You were just supposed to "know" how to cook a custard.

We know how to do a LOT less than we used to, and because of that? We understand less. We only think we know more. But a lot of us have no understanding of where that information comes from, or how to evaluate it. I think we're pretty stupid, honestly.
 
Picton said:
I think we know less now.

Think of all the skills and knowledge our grandparents needed. Case in point: I inherited my grandma's old recipe book from when she was a little girl, so figure late 1920s or so. You open to the recipe for CHEESE, which people back then had to know how to make if they wanted it. She starts out with, "Place 1 1/2 gal thick clabber milk on stove where it will become very hot."

The recipe takes it for granted that you know what clabber milk is, how it's different from non-clabber milk, how to acquire 1.5 gallons of it, etc. Nobody today knows that anymore, and yet back then it was considered commonplace for a rural girl to know all that. The book is packed with recipes like that. Her recipe for Ice Cream (also not something she could buy) starts, "Cook a custard using 1 quart milk, egg..." You were just supposed to "know" how to cook a custard.

We know how to do a LOT less than we used to, and because of that? We understand less. We only think we know more. But a lot of us have no understanding of where that information comes from, or how to evaluate it. I think we're pretty stupid, honestly.
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They definitely don't make em' the way they used to! Nowadays the damn TV, computer/laptop, or cell phone is hotter than the stove will ever get! [rofl]
 
Picton said:
I think we know less now.

Think of all the skills and knowledge our grandparents needed. Case in point: I inherited my grandma's old recipe book from when she was a little girl, so figure late 1920s or so. You open to the recipe for CHEESE, which people back then had to know how to make if they wanted it. She starts out with, "Place 1 1/2 gal thick clabber milk on stove where it will become very hot."

The recipe takes it for granted that you know what clabber milk is, how it's different from non-clabber milk, how to acquire 1.5 gallons of it, etc. Nobody today knows that anymore, and yet back then it was considered commonplace for a rural girl to know all that. The book is packed with recipes like that. Her recipe for Ice Cream (also not something she could buy) starts, "Cook a custard using 1 quart milk, egg..." You were just supposed to "know" how to cook a custard.

We know how to do a LOT less than we used to, and because of that? We understand less. We only think we know more. But a lot of us have no understanding of where that information comes from, or how to evaluate it. I think we're pretty stupid, honestly.
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Not sure I'd use the word stupid. The human mind is certainly as capable as it always has been. But it could easily be argued we've become complacent and accepting. We don't have to know how cheese is made...we could never imagine a life without going to the local market and tossing a pound of provolone in the cart. I think it's safe to say as a whole we're more intellectually lazy now, in that we don't need to be bothered with the details or history...so we don't learn it unless there is some personal curiosity about a subject. We just know "different" stuff and because technology has made life easier in many ways, it's safe to say many of those "different" things we know are not all that utilitarian. Posting a tik-tok video would escape Gramdma, but it's common knowledge amongst 14 year old girls. How valueable that is...only to the 14 year old girls.
 
GL2020 said:
Agreed, but my point was the most intelligent of today is not more intelligent of 500 years ago. He has access to more info, more history, better technology and research, but his ability to "reason" is no better than the old guy if he had the same tools available to him. I'm not even sure I'd go along with we have "more" smart people. I think we just know about more of them because our technology allows us to.
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I agree with that. I also think in the old/ancient times, people were challenged more to use their brains. The ones who got smart adapted and survived and the dumb ones didn't.
 
GL2020 said:
Agreed, but my point was the most intelligent of today is not more intelligent of 500 years ago. He has access to more info, more history, better technology and research, but his ability to "reason" is no better than the old guy if he had the same tools available to him. I'm not even sure I'd go along with we have "more" smart people. I think we just know about more of them because our technology allows us to.
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There are more smart people because there are more people. With today's population, that small part of the bell curve at the high end represents more people. That said, there are of course more people with average and less than average intelligence also.
 
GL2020 said:
Yup I agree. But always good to have a backup.

You might not know off the top of your head, but you could do the actual division and come up with .125 in a bind
And now I need to add a couple fractions and find the mid point (wife like the pic in the middle of the wall), I'm reaching for a pencil
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I will use the basic windows calculator if I’m not using my CAD software.

It’s been 10+ years since I’ve used math CAD or what to figure things out. It’s really not a thing now
 
TLB said:
There are more smart people because there are more people. With today's population, that small part of the bell curve at the high end represents more people. That said, there are of course more people with average and less than average intelligence also.
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Drat...perfectly good point foiled by math again!
 
TLB said:
There are more smart people because there are more people. With today's population, that small part of the bell curve at the high end represents more people. That said, there are of course more people with average and less than average intelligence also.
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In history dumb people very often failed to effectively reproduce.
Then smart people developed methods to create food surpluses.
 
Picton said:
I had to take stats in grad school. The professor was an old-skool stats geek who knew all the formulas. He was aware, however, that he was teaching a bunch of non-Math types, so on the first day he told us he'd be available in his office hours, where he'd be happy to discuss Pearson's R and shit like that for hours with anyone who came by.

"For the rest of you," he went on, "here's the deal. There's nothing those formulas can do that Microsoft Excel can't do faster and more accurately. And since you're only here to fulfill a requirement and not learn how to be actual mathematicians? I'll just teach you how to use the Excel spreadsheets to do correlations and stuff."

And that's exactly what he did.
Click to expand...

I took stats in college, learned the formulas & we used the mainframe computer (had to go to the computer lab to use a terminal). I was also taking an intro to computing course where we learned a little Basic/Cobol, how to use Lotus123 spreadsheet & word processing. I figured out how to do some of the formulas/regression stuff on the spreadsheet & showed the professor who was wowed by it.

I don't remember any of the statistical formulae but I do remember the basic concepts and also feel that knowing the basic computing concepts i.e. using command driven OS & stuff helped me become a "sophisticated user" of off the shelf software. Didn't hurt my career. When I first started in banking there was one IBM PC XT for the group to use, I was one of the few users. They thought I was a genius for being able to spreadsheet simple stuff & I got to travel the world and do some cool things in my 20's. I felt I was using a fraction of my talent, that the work wasn't really what I should be doing, but the recognition/advancement didn't hurt and I made the best of it.

It's good to know how things work but it's better to know how to get things done. Sure, in a SHTF world it'll be good to know how to do some things we take for granted, but the flip side is that there's also some value to using all the modern tools at our disposal to prepare ourselves to weather that scenario if it ever comes without resorting to living like the Amish now.
 
My dad gave me his slide rule from college along with the hard cover book on how to use it. I think I added two numbers once. If an EMP ever renders calculators and pencils and paper obsolete I guess I can learn to add on that.
 
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