A slide rule can be used to prop up your head when napping at your desk.
A slide rule can help you pass the time while waiting as you try to recall how to use the various scales and when each one is necessary.
A slide rule can be used to conduct the music coming through your stereo system as you play old vinyl albums.
A slide rule can be used to complete the calculations necessary to build a bridge, design a nuclear reactor and put it safely inside a submarine, calculate the results of biomedical analysis, compute target motion analysis, and a host of other tasks that we either don’t do anymore or allow our computers to perform instead.
All three computers are now upgraded to Windows 7. In many ways, I still miss the days of C:\DOS, C:\DOS run. We bought two new flash drives yesterday to replace two that have always thought A slide rule were CD players first and data storage units second. We went for 4 Gigabyte units. Standing there in the store I was reminded of my first PC with a 10megabyte hard drive. It ran word processing programs, spreadsheets, and data bases. With an external modem it would connect at 300BPS and allow me to log onto Prodigy. “No one,” said the computer companies “will never need more than 10 MB worth of data storage.”
Today, there exists a generation that has never seen the old 5 ¾ inch floppies or even the 3.5 in hard shelled floppies. The concept of data and programming on tape reels must seem like a grim fairy tale while punch card programming must call up visions of hell. It was possible to bomb a program or crash a computer with a single careless punch, a spindled, folded, or mutilated card, or a smear of peanut butter. Slide rules must seem like fossils to today’s computerized students. . I still have two slide rules in the house and a working slide rule tie bar.
Today has been somewhat damp and cloudy. It rained a bit around 1530, just enough to say it rained but not measureable. There was a large red blob on the Morristown NWS radar but it wandered off away from us and the current radar shows only some light precipitation in greens and yellow that will likely not dampen our door step.
Currently there is a pork sirloin roast in the oven. It has been sitting at room temperature for about 2.5 hours so that it can finish defrosting. I smeared it heavily with a mixture of garlic, fresh ginger, kosher salt, Coleman’s dried mustard, paprika, garam masala, and 12 year old balsamic vinegar. I’ll sear it at 500° F then back the oven down to 350 to finish it. I’ll serve it with baked sweet potatoes and Brussels sprouts.
I’ve got to sit down and write some notes in sympathy cards tonight, in order to mail them tomorrow. It’s hard to know how to do these given that they will be torn up by the recipients if I write what I really want to say. One thing is for certain, the limited and all too brief impression of the deceased that I have is not what I see from others. I’d very much have liked to learn more about him.
At times like this, dealing with a problem that refuses solution, I remember that one could always take a metal slide rule and beat the crap out of something. It doesn’t provide an answer but it does work off some frustration.
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