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A TV is a great thing to have around, as long as you don't watch TV.

Sometimes I still use a slide rule. Much faster when seeking a compromise for a filter, to stay with catalog part values. At one company that caused a small group of engineers to congregate around my desk while I was fetching a glass of water. "We do have electric light out here, you know?"

Unfortunately the round one, a Scientific Instruments No.250, misses a center pivot screw, the disk center became hard to turn and scrapes and the plastic pouch shrank on account of the California sun that it must not be used to. The other, a German Aristo 0903VS still works fine but is big. The Universum Rietz from my late father-in-law is beginning to lose the Formica overlays :-(

If that's being a Luddite, why, then so am I. I never owned one and don't want one either.

Jeroen Belleman

In our house we have 2.7 TVs per person, and I don't think I spend 20 minutes a week watching any of them.

Yikes! Do you even have a TV in the loo? :-)

Then why do you have all those TV sets? Someone else in the family addicted to it?

Nope. Two in my office (sound never turned up), one plasma one in shop (only connected to DVD player), one in C's office, one big HD one in family room, one bigger HD one in media room, one fast HD one in game room, and one in MBR with lift to hide it most of the time.

The cost is minimal.. it's all the cable options that add up because those are ongoing expenses. All those set-top boxes seem to use a lot of juice too, if someone forgets to turn them off.

On a sunny day (Mon, 04 Jun 2012 09:30:59 -0700) it happened Joerg wrote in :

I had an Aristo studio, but IIRC somebody borrowed it and it suffered fatal injuries. Never missed it for a second after buying my first calculator.

Then the programmable was the next step.

Awwwwwh! We beat you... we have 3 TV sets per person ;-) But we watch NO network stuff, just movies... and O'Reilly ;-) ...Jim Thompson

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The technology is fine, but the program content is much too rarely worth watching.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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I just got satellite hooked up here, Saturday. I was without TV for six weeks or so. I didn't really miss it that much but there are some shows I like to watch. Some of them are starting again this week. I've been waiting until I get back to AL on the weekends but other things come up.

We only have 1.5, per person. ...and per house. ...and per city. ...per state. ;-)

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Over six months here when we moved to the US. Nasty weather rolled in during a Saturday in fall and I figured, oh, watching the weather forecast would be nice. Ah, we had that 14" TV set! Hmm, needs 230V. Well, I am an engineer so that ought to be easy. It was, set came on. It no workie .. it's a different TV standard ... ... so I whistled innocently, packed it all up and bought a TV set at Sam's Club on Monday night.

You still have to work out of state every week? Must be tough. Any chance that could change? Maybe an aerospace gig near Huntsville or so.

I mostly watch DVDs. Mostly older movies, the current crop mostly should come with a complimentary baseball cap that can only be worn backwards.

:-)

-- "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." (Richard Feynman)

Who ever used a slide rule for addition?

I've noticed your liking of lots of (in)significant figures :-)

The demise of the slide rule deprived subsequent generations of the need to master approximate mental calculations. A skill that engendered common sense in engineering.

Joerg will remember my posting pictures of my Faber-Castell ten-inch Darmstadt. I still use it.

I'll probably be buried with it ;-)

I still do a lot of math in my head. It's not digit shuffling, it's more like a slide rule, sort of analog interpolation between memorized cardinal points. It annoys the kids... they are just starting to pull out their smart phones, and I already have about the right answer. A rough number, maybe 10% accurate, is great to have when you're trying to decide if some effect is significant or even useful. I can design a lot of control loops without benefit of calculators or computers.

I was a yellow aluminum Pickett guy myself. But then, I got them free from a friend, who, in retrospect, probably stole them.

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We bought a house here (the reason I no longer had TV hooked up) but, yes, I drive back on the weekends. It hopefully will change soon, we'll see. Huntsville is about 3x farther, more expensive, and not nearly as nice.

You got that right! I lost that ability within a couple of years of switching to a calculator.

On a sunny day (Tue, 05 Jun 2012 08:16:29 -0700) it happened Fred Abse wrote in :

You would not believe what slide rules are used for.

I dunno, I have made it clear that 2 digits after the dot is enough for me in most cases. Depends if I write double variable; fprintf(stderr, ""%.f\n", variable) // or fprintf(stderr, "%.2f\n", variable);

If your figure is insignificant that is not my problem :-) Try eating more fatty food :-)

I once actually had to do a slide rule test..

I am not so much a math believer, in my view and experience the human neural net outperforms the limited simulation running in a neural subset called 'math'. Math is just an engineering tool to get some quantities, understanding is what is needed, that is why physics has gone astray.

Digging earth with it will damage it, better leave it to some museum, IF anyone wants it. Maybe auction it?

Did you read Tom Potter's posting in sci.physic about Feynman not being able to decipher the Maya language? And some students did?