I'm home. I have bag o' files staring at me, saying, "Turn us into comments, teacher-lady!"

Donwanna.

Oooh, lookit the pretty: [link] That's a mahagony body and celluloid scales, from sometime around 1920. It's $200. I don't think I can justify $200 for even a really really pretty slide rule.

Kristin, I've got a stack of midterms to grade. From glancing at a bunch of them, I already know that a good number of my students completely forgot about the existance of numbers other than integers. (Basically, they were able to get to a point in the problem where they realized that the answer had to be bigger than 1000 and smaller than 1001, and just said, "There isn't an answer. There are no numbers between 1000 and 1001.") Don't wanna grade these, either.

Hil, clearly this means we should say "screw the schoolwork" and go get a beer together.

Clearly.

I'm still drooling over some of these old slide rules. I have a feeling that slide rules may soon be added to the list of stuff I collect. (Currently, I seem to be collecting old cookbooks, Wizard of Oz stuff, penguin stuff, and old movie posters. The movie posters and cookbooks were an intentional "I should collect this" thing. The others were more that I kept buying or getting stuff, and then realized, "Huh. I've got a lot of this.")

Slide rules were pretty expensive growing up, and calculators were all the rage in HS.

I have my brother's slide rule as he was a geek, too, but 15 years older.

He was going to teach me someday.

Crap, now I miss him.

I'm really liking this medical group/hospital that I seem to be part of. The nurses apparently do a follow up phone call, to make sure your ok after the outpatient procedure. It went likes this:

Nurse: just calling to check how you are doing. Have you eaten yet?

Me: Yup, I had a bowl of cheerios.

Nurse: (chuckles)

Me: what?

Nurse: I thought you said you were hungry?

Me: I was, but y'all said go easy on the food. I was following doctors orders.

Nurse: That you did. Very good. You're fine, go eat something big

Me: OK!

I have the slide rule my father used in school. It comes with the original instructions, but I've never sat down to learn how to use it. My dad was always proud that he could use one.

I just bid on a slide rule on eBay. A fairly basic wooden one. I was the first bid at $5. There are some REALLY neat older ones there, too.

Interesting how the looks of things like this change. I went to a museum of the history of science in Italy, and it struck me how a lot of the older telescopes and things like that were covered with decorative paper or had carved wood. Things totally unneccesary for the function, but they made them pretty anyway. And these slide rules definitely have a range from purely functional to ones that were definitely made to look nice, too.

It's kind of happening with calculators, too. Graphing calculators were the big new thing when I was in middle school and high school, and I think there were two companies (Texas Instruments and HP) making them, and they were available in blue or grey -- each model was a slightly different shade of blue or grey. Now, they come in all different colors. I saw a girl using a pink graphing calculator.

Now that I think about it, I think there's a slide rule in my parents' attic, in my mom's box of stuff from when she worked on the Apollo Project. I know there's a flow-chart stencil in there. Plus two really thick books of the flowcharts for all the computers on Apollo 11.

Plus two really thick books of the flowcharts for all the computers on Apollo 11.

Delete that post right now Hil before Joe sees it and breaks into your house. I'm not even kidding.