Posts Tagged calculator

Rabid for numbered bones

I am absorbing a great deal of information from the 2009 American Statistical Association’s Quality & Productivity Research Conference at IBM’s Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.   However, since IBM sold off their PC business to the Chinese manufacturer Lenovo, I am not quite sure what’s being researched at this facility.  The official word is that IBM now provides “solutions.”  See if you can puzzle things out from this 2009 newsletter .  But, for those who are hard-core ‘techies’, check out this impressive list of IBM R&D projects, which include such things as quantum mirages and blue genes.

IBM presents an impressive collection of calculating devices in the lobby of this R&D center.  For example, see pictured an actual 1617 set of Napier’s bones made by the Scottish inventor of logarithms.  Via a process called rabdology (from the Greek “rabid” for rod, and “logos” for calculating), these numbered rods of skeletal origin facilitated multiplication and the computation of square and cube roots.  

PS. Coincidentally, I just saw the latest Star Trek movie.  Being an engineer by profession, I am naturally drawn to the character Scotty.  Having seen what his ancestor Napier did with bones (not to be confused with the Star Trek doctor “Bones”), I now understand why the Enterprise engineer is such a wizard.   Given enough time, these Scots will solve any technical problem.   “I canna change the laws of physics! I’ve got to have thirty minutes.Napier's bones

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Lost arts — slide rules and cursive writing

Now that a whole generation has grown up with personal computers at their disposal, many once-necessary skills have become lost arts. For example, I did most of my college computing with a slide rule, and when I reported to work as summer engineer in 1974, General Mills provided me with a circular one. The University of Minnesota had one Wang calculator that students waited in line to use for doing logarithms to more decimals than possible with a slide rule. General Mills bought one Hewlitt-Packard calculator that did logs and exponential calculations using reverse Polish notation. It was so costly that they bolted it to a table! Nowadays slide rules have become an item for collectors such as fellow U of M alumnus Gary Flom. Aficionados of slide rules formed the Oughtred Society name after William Oughtred, an Anglican minister who invented this calculating device in 1622. My father, an engineer like me, owned a really nice Keuffel and Esser (K&E) slide rule. However, from my quick browsing of the internet, it seems that these go for only about $25 — far less than what one would have paid originally if adjusted to inflation. As reported in The Death of the Slide Rule by James Redin, the K&E manufactured its last slide rule in 1975 — the year I achieved my bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering.

PS. Another lost art, reported in my Sunday newspaper today by Washington Post writer Margaret Webb Pressler,* is cursive (longhand) writing. She reports that 85 percent of almost 1.5 million students taking their college SAT exams wrote in block letters. Computers have made this style of penmanship obsolete. 

*The Handwriting Is on the Wall

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