Instrumental Tricks | Hacker News Reader

Instrumental Tricks

lrb.co.uk

25 points_delirium9 comments

> By the mid-1960s, more than a million slide rules were sold in the US each year. The device became for the mathematically minded what the stethoscope was for the physician: a badge of professionalism as well as a practical tool.

My understanding is that the act of internalizing the meaning of the exponents is a tremendous enabler of understanding; engineers of old achieved a better feel for the task than us moderns with all of the fancy software.

Restated: there may be some good pedagogy in having the initial course or two do things in a classical way ahead of moving on to all of the new methods.

> In an epilogue, Houston compares the fate of the calculator to that of an alien species in the science fiction of Iain M. Banks, which becomes so advanced that it ‘sublimes’ from the physical universe altogether to settle in higher dimensions.

Really nice comparison.

Off topic, but I'm curious about the lack of capitalization for "Nasa" (sic). Is this an oversight by the editor or a style guide choice? "BBC" is capitalized in another article, so presumably it's just a typo?

I've read that it's very British to not all-caps acronyms that are pronounced phonetically. Only those pronounced by the letters, such as BBC.

Indeed, an acronym that can't be pronounced like a word is technically an "initialism," not an acronym.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/initialism

My guess is that it's a deliberate choice by the style guide. It's a frequent enough word to warrant its own acronym, but it's technically not a common noun, like "scuba." Hence the capitalization. Another example that springs to mind is "Covid" instead of "COVID-19."

Well that should really be CoViD-19, but only a Perl programmer would bother with that!

I kind of contributed: https://www.nayuki.io/page/casio-fx-991ms-tips-and-tricks

Interesting history of the abacus, slide rule, and calculator.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com