4 ms·

A pity it is too snarky, I agree with the thesis (it would be very nice to have children/young people to know how to use it) but the tone is too negative. I a

A pity it is too snarky, I agree with the thesis (it would be very nice to have children/young people to know how to use it) but the tone is too negative. I am a big fan of teaching children to use an abacus, also.

boxfire 5y ago
I read the article hoping to see examples of reasoning that the slide rule instilled. It reads more like a jealous rant than anything else. He fails to cite why those plans developments were so fast (hint it wasn't the magic of a slide rule.... It was a decade of design and test in products before the one with the name he assigned all credit to) He also has a sort of confirmation bias here, failing to note things we could not have possibly done without computers. Try a Martian sky crane landing without atmospheric modeling ha ha. Anyone have a reference for rules of thumb type thinking or other insights that come from slide rules?
- boxfire 5y ago
  Moreover this doc makes it more apparent how much he waxes without real references: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20090007797/downloads/20090007797.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20090007797/downloads/20... > Routine calculations were made using slide rules. More complex calculations, such as stress analysis, required Friden mechanical calculators. Fascinating read. No the SR-71 didn't appear out of thin air in a sprint of intensity unheard of on earth to date. Turns out after the U-2 taught us so much we said let's make a higher, faster U-3 and then spent a decade on that concept in a series of designs and tests. I really wish that this kind of cherry-picked mythos building fact wasn't what made half of what built the perception of good engineering to most of my present and future colleagues.
- kec 5y ago
  While this blog post is over the top, I think it is more charitably read as the real-engineer version of "your hobby project or 20 person startup is not a FAANG". Hobby projects or startups are not limited by their ability to scale with massive load spikes or coordinate thousands of code contributors, trendy solutions used by FAANG aren't going to help. Similarly science students, machinists and most engineers working in the physical world are not NASA performing atmospheric models, they are not limited by their ability to perform arbitrary precision calculations. Giving a student a slide rule may help them build an intuition and deeper understanding than giving them a TI-89 or copy of Mathmatica.
bombcar 5y ago
The slide rule and the abacus both bring particular mathematical concepts to the forefront in ways that discussion alone doesn’t do. A particular famous slide rule is the circular “flight computer” - E6B. Showing and working out why it works to do various flight calculations can be instructive.
- pfortuny 5y ago
  I think that circular "computer" appears explicitly (as a photo) in the post. Thanks for the info!
- ravi-delia 5y ago
  Fluidly thinking of multiplication as addition of exponents is handy, but a slide rule won't do anything for that a few dozen exercises without a calculator couldn't.
iancmceachern 5y ago
Yes, me too. I bought an abacus a while ago and learned to use it, what a joy. There are also some great documentaries on abacus education in Japan. It's amazing that the top abacus users stop needing an abacus and can do calculations just by imagining an abacus.

boxfire 5y ago

I read the article hoping to see examples of reasoning that the slide rule instilled. It reads more like a jealous rant than anything else. He fails to cite why those plans developments were so fast (hint it wasn't the magic of a slide rule.... It was a decade of design and test in products before the one with the name he assigned all credit to) He also has a sort of confirmation bias here, failing to note things we could not have possibly done without computers. Try a Martian sky crane landing without atmospheric modeling ha ha. Anyone have a reference for rules of thumb type thinking or other insights that come from slide rules?

boxfire 5y ago
Moreover this doc makes it more apparent how much he waxes without real references: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20090007797/downloads/20090007797.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20090007797/downloads/20... > Routine calculations were made using slide rules. More complex calculations, such as stress analysis, required Friden mechanical calculators. Fascinating read. No the SR-71 didn't appear out of thin air in a sprint of intensity unheard of on earth to date. Turns out after the U-2 taught us so much we said let's make a higher, faster U-3 and then spent a decade on that concept in a series of designs and tests. I really wish that this kind of cherry-picked mythos building fact wasn't what made half of what built the perception of good engineering to most of my present and future colleagues.
kec 5y ago
While this blog post is over the top, I think it is more charitably read as the real-engineer version of "your hobby project or 20 person startup is not a FAANG". Hobby projects or startups are not limited by their ability to scale with massive load spikes or coordinate thousands of code contributors, trendy solutions used by FAANG aren't going to help. Similarly science students, machinists and most engineers working in the physical world are not NASA performing atmospheric models, they are not limited by their ability to perform arbitrary precision calculations. Giving a student a slide rule may help them build an intuition and deeper understanding than giving them a TI-89 or copy of Mathmatica.

bombcar 5y ago

The slide rule and the abacus both bring particular mathematical concepts to the forefront in ways that discussion alone doesn’t do. A particular famous slide rule is the circular “flight computer” - E6B. Showing and working out why it works to do various flight calculations can be instructive.

pfortuny 5y ago
I think that circular "computer" appears explicitly (as a photo) in the post. Thanks for the info!
ravi-delia 5y ago
Fluidly thinking of multiplication as addition of exponents is handy, but a slide rule won't do anything for that a few dozen exercises without a calculator couldn't.

iancmceachern 5y ago

Yes, me too. I bought an abacus a while ago and learned to use it, what a joy. There are also some great documentaries on abacus education in Japan. It's amazing that the top abacus users stop needing an abacus and can do calculations just by imagining an abacus.