🚀 go-pugleaf

On Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:24:38 -0500
Dave Garland <dave.g...@wizinfo.com> wrote:

> I'd always lusted after one of those (I'm from the slide rule 
> generation), but by the time they became reasonably priced I really 

	I'm from the transition generation, I started with slide rules and
still have my ten inch duplex, but calculators did their big price drop
while I was going through school. IIRC it was in the fourth form that
calculators became permitted in the daily slide rule drills (by that time
quite lengthy series of calculations to be performed in races - 3 digit
accurate result required).

	We learned that calculators were slower than slide rules and prone
to strange large errors while slide rules were prone to small errors and
easily spotted order of magnitude errors ... within a year we were all using
calculators.

	I still don't understand this, I conclude that we weren't
particularly rational at fourteen or so.

	Much more recently tutoring a friend through leaving cert maths I
found she reached for a calculator whenever arithmetic was called for, even
dividing by two, multiplying by ten ... and never thought to do any mental
arithmetic.

	I broke her of the habit by doing most of the sums in my head (at
least roughly) while she was still pushing buttons and pointing out the
frequent errors. By the end I had her doing simple ones in her head and
always doing rough sanity checks in her head for the complex ones - her
error rate plummeted.

-- 
Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays
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The computer obeys and wins.                |    licences available see
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