Comment by xelxebar
1 year ago
How timely! I just learned how to use a slide rule yesterday. Looking to pick one up, and a bit overwhelmed by the plethora of choices, I went down a small rabbit hole[0]. Some slide rules produced are pure works of art!
Lately, I've been rediscovering the surprising niceties that analog tools can provide over our everything-is-a-panel-of-glass interfaces these days. Recently, I have been enjoying pen and paper as my editor for initial drafts of projects I'm coding.
Does HN have love for any analog tools in particular?
I've been doing a math course and occasionally think of picking up these analogue tools. Someone on Hacker News had me interested in the Soroban, the Japanese abacus [1], which is still used to train insane mental math speeds to this day [2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soroban
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6OmqXCsYt8
We're definitely on a similar wavelength. I actually own a couple Japanese abaci and know the basics. Top performers feel near magical: double-fisters[0] and blazingly fast mental arithmetic [1].
[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EK6uIjjkrGE
[1]:https://youtu.be/-kjUCtqSWlw?feature=shared&t=451
Have you used it much? I'd like one, but I can imagine it sitting on my desk for years unused. I have "Secrets of Mental Math" by Arthur Benjamin and have wanted to practice some of those mental math skills, and I wonder if learning the soroban will interfere with my existing mental calculation framework (which is admittedly weak at the moment).
I have several slide rules and use them daily. Especially in the kitchen where we deal a lot with scaling proportions they are the best tool available: you set them for the desired scale, and then you can just read off any proportion you need in the blink of an eye.
I'm honestly surprised they are not standard issue in kitchens.
Soroban. Japanese abacus. Every number only has one representation. +-*/ and other calculations.
http://totton.idirect.com/
Indeed, I use pen/pencil and (dot) paper. Different brain space.
Where can I get the meter-long slide rule the man is holding in OP?
They show up on eBay. A search this minute revealed two:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/205220626817 https://www.ebay.com/itm/156686655356
They go for a bit more than the original price, according to this:
"Pricing varied by retailer, however Pickett did offer demonstration slide rules in 4 foot and 7 foot lengths: a 4 foot rule sold for $15 and the 7 foot rule was $25 in 1960. These were available with scales to match models N4, N803, and N1010 with the Ln scale added. These large rules were available free to schools which ordered 24 or more slide rules!"
[0] https://www.sphere.bc.ca/oldsite/test/pickett.html