Slide Rules

On 3 March 2013 19:41, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: '85 here. Never ever saw one in any educational/scientific context. Knew a few older scientists & engineers who kept one around for sentimental value. My father was one. He never taught me to use them, though. Like the currency pounds, shillings and pence, or the units of ounces, pounds, hundredweights, furlongs, leagues, degrees Fahrenheit and so on, they were all gone before my time. I entered school in about 1971. To this day, I have no clue how many "oz" in a "lb" or "lb" in a stone, or yards in a mile, or any of that stuff. All alien to me: weird, incomprehensible, confusing and a little scary. I am waiting for several late-40s or older types to tell me that there are in fact 235 oz/lb and 12357.3 lb/st and 6.2343648?10?? yards to the mile and that it all makes /perfect/ sense if you just remember these and 460924707 simple, obvious numbers. That obviously, although Fahrenheit is a simple clear logical scale that defines 0? as the temperature of the earlobe of a Siberian pine marten that has been inserted into a 42 ton snowdrift for exactly 3.461376 hours in Perm on the 15 Feb 1765 and 100? is a slight mismeasurement of the average rectal temperature of an unladen African swallow at cruising speed, it makes perfect sense because you see 88? is a nice day and 46? is a howling blizzard and these are sensible human numbers. I mean, who would want a scale from 0 for freezing to 100 for boiling? That's just crazy talk! -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884