The article is over-the-top in lots of ways, which is a shame, because slide rules really are worth learning. I love them. Always have. I've designed several for calculations that are specific to my research field.
I would love to get my students using slide rules, but it's difficult to find physical ones for a reasonable price. Virtual slide rules, like those at http://www.antiquark.com/sliderule/sim/, are just not quite the same as a physical thing, which requires force to slide, and good light to see the details.
I miss the days when you could go into any university bookstore and find sliderules in a wide range of prices. Another fond memory is watching my high-school teacher using a broomstick to move the slider on a giant sliderule he had above his blackboard.
What do students miss, using calculators?
1. Concrete notions of the difficulty of measurement, each digit being much harder to obtain than its predecessor.
2. A intuitive feeling for the propagation of uncertainty.
3. The ability to carry the exponents of 10 in their head.
Lacking this sort foundation seems to make it hard for people to connect their calculations, or numbers they read, with reality. This makes it hard to spot errors. It also makes it hard to remember things effectively. For example, I've found that students remember the mantissa of Avogadro's number correctly to 3 digits, but they have no idea on the exponent. The same goes for the speed of light in a vacuum. These errors were rare in the sliderule age, because it was imperative to keep the exponent in your head, as you worked through a calculation.
OK, who's going to make the under-the-scale LED lighting, and a motorized slide and then the number gets displayed in digits in an ambient display under the left bottom stationary part? A 2022 Slide Rule -- Modern Retro-Computing?
>I would love to get my students using slide rules, but it's difficult to find physical ones for a reasonable price.
What's your idea of a reasonable price? I know it's going to be a bulk pack.
This sounds like a hobby project challenge. The scales are easy to do with CNC and computers, or laser printers. You need a small bit of routing, or a rabbit plane, to make the groves to hold the slide in. The two ends. The hairline/scale is the trickiest bit because you want a leaf spring making it slide nice, but hold its position.
It might be something the folks at your friendly makerspace find an interesting challenge. I know I would, were I not having eye surgery and a month or two of "don't do anything fun" ahead of me tomorrow.
You could also get nicely printed (engraved I think) log paper (in a number of different scale configurations) for much longer. Also from K&E. Like printed Smith charts, though, it has gone the way of the dodo - people that need one just print out a pdf.
You can get a perfectly good slide rule for less than 20 USD on Ebay including shipping. On Finn.no (a similar site in Norway) there are decent slide rules for half that price. A quick search of a random Craigslist, Central New Jersey also finds several in the sub 20 USD range.
Sounds reasonable to me, what did you mean by a reasonable price?
I would love to get my students using slide rules, but it's difficult to find physical ones for a reasonable price. Virtual slide rules, like those at http://www.antiquark.com/sliderule/sim/, are just not quite the same as a physical thing, which requires force to slide, and good light to see the details.
I miss the days when you could go into any university bookstore and find sliderules in a wide range of prices. Another fond memory is watching my high-school teacher using a broomstick to move the slider on a giant sliderule he had above his blackboard.
What do students miss, using calculators? 1. Concrete notions of the difficulty of measurement, each digit being much harder to obtain than its predecessor. 2. A intuitive feeling for the propagation of uncertainty. 3. The ability to carry the exponents of 10 in their head.
Lacking this sort foundation seems to make it hard for people to connect their calculations, or numbers they read, with reality. This makes it hard to spot errors. It also makes it hard to remember things effectively. For example, I've found that students remember the mantissa of Avogadro's number correctly to 3 digits, but they have no idea on the exponent. The same goes for the speed of light in a vacuum. These errors were rare in the sliderule age, because it was imperative to keep the exponent in your head, as you worked through a calculation.