Comment by gerdesj
3 months ago
It is worth keeping one around.
When the "cloud" is raining and your laptop and phone batteries are drained and you suddenly need to navigate your 4823 times table - its got you covered.
You will also need to work out how to write with a pen or pencil on paper or try and fix up your atrophied ability to remember arbitrary "facts" short term.
Honestly the scenarios where this becomes likely are dwindling with the advent of solar and batteries. Offline knowledgebases and the ability to use them long term are getting increasingly stable, and the likely low point in a societal collapse is probably getting high enough that a slide rule would not be necessary.
I have a Casio fx-991ES calculator, and twenty years later I have yet to need to replace the button cell in it thanks to the tiny solar cell.
And when the EMP washes over your home/office it will most likely be off and most likely survive. If you are doing your monthly finances at the time and it is on, it will be destroyed. The slide rule rules!!! I keep a pocket Pickett for fun...the window has a small crack, and it is missing a very tiny screw (1 of 8). I brought it to my engineering company one day and showed the 20-30-something group how it worked. I then did a full page of calcs they did in Excel, and even with the limits of visual resolution came within an acceptable percentage of their calc.
That's not quite how EMPs work. The wire traces act as antennas, and long wires like power transmission lines will have huge power surges, and small devices like calculators will have basically none. The miniscule increase in length of conductive material if the battery happens to be conducting at the moment won't impact the amount of current induced.
Solar EMPs won't be powerful enough to impact electronics. A nuclear EMP can impact electronics, but only over a small geographic area; close enough that if you are in the electronics-frying radius of a nuclear weapon explosion, you either have much larger problems to worry about, or nothing at all to worry about ever again.
Here's info from Los Alamos Lab on it: https://www.lanl.gov/media/publications/national-security-sc...
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