FoxTrot by Bill Amend for September 24, 2017

I was going to question an abacus, but Marcus somehow beat me to it.

Funny, but I still remember when we had to KNOW the answers. No calculators (slide rules or abaci) allowed.

It’s stupid to think a slide rule is superior to a calculator. A slide rule is accurate to very few significant digits, far less than a calculator. What’s “better” about “thinking” Pi is 3.14, as opposed to what Jason cited?

I was and still am mostly math blind. My brain refused to go any further that multiplication and division. Square roots beyond the lower digits is beyond me. My brain rebels. Wish I was as interested in it as much as Jason is.

Math is beyond me.

Night-guants comment seems to have “multiplied”

I still have the cheap circular slide rule that we got for high school physics. Very occasionally I’ve shown it to some younger person who is curious how these worked.

But if there’s a serious point here, it’s that while you’re in school, you work things out with pencil and paper (or to do it in your head, but you need to write it down to show your work), because the important thing is that you learn how the calculations are done, and then once you’ve understood that, you get plenty of practice in actually doing them. If using a calculating device is cheating anybody, it’s cheating the students.

I recently went back to college for a refresher algebra course (required by the local school district for all substitute teachers) and the professor teaching the class had never seen a slide rule used. She couldn’t understand how a 60 year old man was solving logs faster than the rest of the class could type them into their calculators

Oh my, reversed tech evolution!

Remember Pickett’s ad campaign touting the use of their 5" rule as the “computer” aboard the Apollo missions?

The thought of a slide rule just brings back the nightmare of advanced math.

Still use my slide rule to calculate gas mileage.

Calculators and slide rules both use logarithms to perform their functions. Calculators do it using binary.

I must be really old school. I use my brain!

This will be posted on the wall of 10 000 math classrooms around the world by Monday. Mine included. :-)

Those of us over 60 can do calculations with a pencil and paper, or a slide rule, or a calculator, or a computer, whatever is available.

I was a student when the Texas Instruments calculators came out, with the tiny red display. Their solution to the key bounce problem was to make the keys very hard to push. Most students bought them but I never did. They were junk. My science teacher had a drawer full of broken ones that the students gave him when they broke.

This may betray my age, but when I was taking a class in Statistical Thermodynamics in college, all we had was a slide rule. Very easy to misplace a decimal and get the wrong answer. I can’t speak for the other students, but I would have killed for a calculator.

Yep, nothing as accurate as estimating 15 decimal places….

Marcus, you might want to exchange that abacus for a Japanese style pocket abacus.

I bought my husband the first HP-35 handheld calculater. $400 in 1972 ($2350 in today’s dollars.) We had to go to HP in California to get it. It did trig functions.

I don’t know about the merits of a calculator. But their continued pricing, especially for graphing ones, is absurd. A free program on my phone or computer is capable for sufficing all the purposes a graphic calculator is capable of, but TI still gets away with pricing their models far higher than is reasonable.

When I was in first grade, we used plastic abaci called “Numberaids” see http://tinyurl.com/yadpkgqy. Brings back memories.

I love math, but not as much as Jason and Marcus.

When I was in my sr. year of high school, I saw my first calculator. It was an TI and cost about $800 (the kid’s parents were well to do). I had already been using a slide rule (slip stick) for about 2 years. Some for the more advanced math but mostly in physics. We still had to use pencil and paper and books for more basic math and chemistry. Can’t say I remember how to use it now, but I still find myself checking the calculator by doing the rough math in my head. :o)

Try figuring out the square root 93 without a calculator. Or 126. or 233.

She’s my number pi 3.14159 Sweet, sweet number pi.

Has anyone heard of the Chisanbop method of doing calculations? It is an abacus-like finger counting method used to perform basic mathematical operations. Very effective, no accoutrements needed, execpt one needs all ten digits.

I used to have a slide rule, and actually knew how to use it.Remember, folks, slide rules are what NASA used to get us to the Moon.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…!

“Pshaw”?!