Clear Ambiguity

Mark C. Chu-Carroll is competing in a Geekoff with some other highly qualified people over at http://scienceblogs.com. Romana was kind enough to send me a nice little article about slide rules explained by a true master of math education on his Good Math, Bad Math blog. He even has the same K&E rule as I recently bought on Ebay in it’s beautiful orange leather case. The blog entry is worth reading to get your head around some slide rule basics and explains how slide rules make math tactile. That is you get more of a feeling for what is going on.
Chu-Carroll even uses stack based calculators, so you know he is a smart man :)

Just in case he reads this though … What no Intercal?
Here are some photos of my new (well made in 1956) toy

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Slide Rule Calculations By Example

Hopefully you aren’t quite as geeky as me (Romana uses the nasty NERD! label). If you do suffer from a slight geekiness and just have to find out lots about slide rules, then follow this link to some really impressive instructions. Slide rules are surprisingly useful as you have to actually think a bit about your calculations, especially working out the order of magnitude as .025, 2.5, 25, 250 etc are all the same on a slide rule.

There are quite a few bookmarks over on the right in the del.icio.us tags cloud, but this one deserves special recognition. So look through your dusty drawers, ask your relatives and have a play with a wonderful tool that helped create some fantastic engineering over the last 400 years.

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