MY DEMENTED DIARY

Oh by the way, folks, oldest entries are deleted to keep the total entry count at 666 because that number is sure to rile up somebody who sorely needs it.

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My Biography

My Beliefs

My more serious diary:
A Walk Through the
Valley of the Shadow

Today we celebrate the birthday of William Oughtred, born in 1574. He played a role in the development of the slide rule.

Here's the story. Edmund Gunter fabricated a logarithmic scale and added lengths with a pair of dividers. But what do you do when you go past the end of your scale?

So Delamain fabricated one of Gunter's scales around the perimeter of a circle.

Then William Oughtred came along with two ideas. First, take Delamain's circle and fabricate a pivoting dividers onto it, and then further improve it by using two of Delamain's circles pivoting together. Second, taking two of Gunter's straight scales and plopping them side-by-side, whereupon he discovered that if the length went over the end you could swap ends.

Then a coupla centuries later Amadee Mannheim figured out how to attach the two scales together with a sliding bracket, and Voila! The slide rule was born!

Then in the 1970's or thereabouts when battery-powered calculators were invented, thus rendering slide rules obsolete, college courses continued to require the students to have slide rules because professors are traditionally dedicated to the love of the ancient and worship of the obsolete.

So, the cry, "Down with calculators! Long live slide rules and abacuses and piles of little stones!" was heard echoing through the Halls of Academia.

To the best of my knowledge, slide rules are now completely out of production. I still own my old Pickett model NT-4 Log-Log-Vector-Hyperbolic with 33 scales (16 on the front and 17 on the back) and it's a nice museum piece but of no practical value in this day and age.

But anyhow, today's gonna be another great day, so says the Wondrous Weather Website. A bit cooler than the last coupla days, perhaps, but nothing to complain about.

Happy Wednesday!

OrneryPest