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Comment by kjellsbells

15 hours ago

I've picked it back up as an intentional way of slowing myself down during calculations.

Typically to do a calc I fire up Excel or the calc on my phone, bang in the numbers and accept the result without thinking. It's that "without thinking" part that is dangerous. The slide rule is slow and physical and forces my brain to think about the inputs. Another nice feature is that it can give you quick answers when you aren't sure of the accuracy of the inputs. eg if 2 * 4 was really 1.8*4.1, what would the answer be? It's quicker to see that on a slide rule (one tap on the ruler) than punch in 7 characters.