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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.