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How about bringing back slide rules?

Pocket_slide_rule
Thanks to Sonja's brother for this delightful and witty New York Times article. If the author was British I would take it for granted that it was ironic, but I must admit to some ambiguity of interpretation with an American author, so the pinches of salt are scattered around my hotel room as I write this.

Two quotes will give you a sense of what it is about:

Like many men, I quickly established a romantic attachment to my G.P.S. I found comfort in her tranquil and slightly Anglophilic voice. I felt warm and safe following her thin blue line. More than once I experienced her mercy, for each of my transgressions would be greeted by nothing worse than a gentle, “Make a U-turn if possible.”

Now, you may wonder if in the process of outsourcing my thinking I am losing my individuality. Not so. My preferences are more narrow and individualistic than ever. It’s merely my autonomy that I’m losing.

The question which comes immediately to mind is the boundary between dangerous dependency and useful tool. Some years ago I had access to a piece of research (but have lost track o f it) which showed that the calculator generation had less sense of the essential rightness or wrongness of an answer that those of us who started with slide rules. I still have mine somewhere and they were wonderful, they took away the drudgery of calculation, but (and it is an important but) you had to be able to work out what power of ten yourself. The calculator generation just get the answer without building that innate sense. Of course any abacus user would wipe the floor with both groups!

I must admit to a view that we should reintroduce slide rules to schools ........

Comments (2)

Wayne Zandbergen:

Dave,
I've taught university mathematics on and off for the past 25 years. I agree completely with your conclusion. Basic arithmetic is a challenge to many calculus students. They often spend so much time thinking about basics, they have no chance of mastering the new material.

Programmers have a similar problem. With debuggers and programming aides, we have the inability to clearly express, and conclusively test, whether code is doing what they really thought it should. Just think of how a spell-checker has impacted our ability to write!!
Wayne

Natalie Bueno Vasquez:

There's a difference between a tool and a crutch, that's for sure. I've got a writing disability, so a spellcheck is crucial to my work, as is getting my important stuff proofread by others to make sure I don't completely embarass myself.

Like with that huge run-on sentence there.

A bigger problem here (US) is all the testing going on of "how much" students have learned to do - managing to the numbers in education has made the use of calclators and other shortcuts nearly mandatory just to cram the answers into kids' heads.

My programming days are over, but I remember catching all kinds of flak from my roommate for being unable to code without a versioner or debugger. I mutter about today's kids not knowing assembly code when they see it.

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