There's a real upside to using a slide rule - it only gives the mantissa of a floating point answer. It's up to the user to figure out the exponent. That makes the user much more aware order of magnitude errors. People who use a slide rule have to develop an intuitive feel for the magnitudes of their answers.
Another upside is that a slide rule is intrinsically analog and that, in my mind, is far preferable to the brutally digital and discontinous machinations of our monster machines.
Because the pace of slide rule calculation is almost infinitely slower than that of a digital computer, the incentive to develop simple, elegant and humanly comprehensible models based on the traditional calculus is tremendous. We will have bridges built against models that don't reside in some proprietary software library.
2 comments:
Nah. Slide rules have their place, and do have advantages, but give me a computer any day.
Understanding magnitude and how to construct simple and elegant models can be learned other ways.
Computers are so much faster than a sliderule, so they allow different techniques to be used, and as someone else said "the problems we face today cannot be solved at the level they were created." Or something like that.
In any case, in addition to the speed, I love the binary brutality of all those 0s and 1s.
Neurons at the speed of light...
Addict.
The old ways have heart. Binary lacks soul.
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