3 ms·
In grad school I learned how to use a slide rule mostly to scare undergrads, but once I got used to it I absolutely loved it. I picked up a really cool brass on
by bandrami 3y ago
In grad school I learned how to use a slide rule mostly to scare undergrads, but once I got used to it I absolutely loved it. I picked up a really cool brass one from a bookstore in Paris a few years later, and ever since then I've used it for any problem with few enough digits.
- orbital-decay 3y agoYeah if you have numerical methods intuition, 99% of the time you can get away with a guesstimation for practically anything. Most people are doing it wrong when they are trying to use calculators for complex computations directly. With a slide rule it's pretty obvious, as the precision is expensive on it. My grandfather, a mechanical engineer, taught me how to use slide rules and nomograms when I was a kid, but I still use calculators since they need fewer workaround tricks.