4 ms·
I have a cheap one from high school chemistry. My wife may have had one, though she would have called it a "proportion wheel"--people doing print production us
by cafard 6y ago
I have a cheap one from high school chemistry.
My wife may have had one, though she would have called it a "proportion wheel"--people doing print production used these well into the 1980s and perhaps beyond to calculate the
reduction need to make photographs fit on a page.
In my view, the great think about slide rules is that they do not encourage false precision. Too many calculator users will copy all those decimal points without considering how far they are meaningful.
- bregma 6y ago> In my view, the great think about slide rules is that they do not encourage false precision. Too many calculator users will copy all those decimal points without considering how far they are meaningful. This is by far the biggest loss from leaving the slide rule behind. People now confuse a greater amount of data with having more information. We have generations who believe they're being more accurate because they appear have greater precision, but in reality they're just more confident in their innumeracy. Hearing more lies (as in the the extra digits) doesn't make you more right. This truth does not just apply to arithmetic, but at least it's more measurable with numbers.
- ghaff 6y agoThere were a bunch of both linear and circular devices that were basically slide rules customized for specific purposes. I'm sure I used one of the print production ones. This sort of thing stayed around for a while after slide rules themselves largely went out in the late 1970s.