Went to hear Doug present on how to use a slide rule at HackPgh last night. 
I found out how to use the scales for finding squares, square roots, cubes and cubed roots. I also learned that with the bigger slide rules there is no end of exponentiation.
I’m most interested in slide rules with elliptical functions. Pictured is a specialty slide rule for doing duct work.
The slider is a circular arc. If you made a circle all the way around, there’s no telling where the multiplication ends.
Here’s what an article I’m reading says:
the entire multiplication table forms a 45 degree-45 degree-90 degree triangle formed by the factors
Heard this on Eames:The Architect and The Painter
“You sell your expertise, you have a limited repertoire; you sell your ignorance, it’s an unlimited repertoire.” — Richard Saul Wurman
Filed under: Uncategorized
Craft sticks and paper fasteners. After Xiaoji Chen’s linkages for a binary adder.
Filed under: education, eutechnics, research, technology, thinking | Tags: computers
The hula hoop is not a meme. . . [it's] a meme vehicle. — James Gleick, The Information
If things make us think, the Digicomp is an infectious way to get us to think about numbers and computing.
Boingboing just posted a story on the Digicomp emulator. I hope to check it out soon.
This is a picture of Consul, the Educated Monkey. There’s a backstory about an actual monkey at the turn of the last century making a big hit in the salons of Europe. I’m not as interested in that as the actual mechanics. Here’s my second or third attempt:
The position of the numbers has something to do with the angle of the links. I’ll be studying the monkey a little more, so I can make an addition and other tables to insert.
I’m also playing with my autocad app and drew this:
Filed under: awareness, education, eutechnics | Tags: counting calculating measuring
I’m almost where I want to be conceptually with this scale. The only materials necessary are the plastic rivets and the coroplast. The coroplast, as you can see, has been recycled. It took me a while to figure out that making slots in the platform would work. The two bottom rivets are actually unnecessary.
I will measure the next iteration more carefully to insure its sensitivity (decrease its tolerance?). I’m also going to see if I can make a coroplast bowl, and how to make a better bearing than just a plain old rivet.
The other thing I want to look at is a $2 handheld Chinese scale, which is somewhat similar to my postage scale.
Filed under: drawing, math, thinking, video | Tags: Geometry numbers counting
In order to make a base 10 adding wheel one has to divide a circle into ten equal parts. With the help of this guide to making a pentagon, I came up with this:
This has the benefit of all the pentagram’s golden ratio goodness. In order to make a proportion wheel (circular slide rule), you’ll need to use a logarithmic scale for numbering an inner and outer circle. Check out the solar physics site for more.
This is my first attempt at making a percent wheel chart from paperboard.
I keep making mistakes, so I keep referring to Make Magazine Phillip Torrone’s article on becoming or not becoming an expert.
