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Feb. 18th, 2012 11:19 pmI wish someone had taught me how to use a slide rule when I was in elementary school. I was working on a problem and set the rule for 6 x 5 to get 30. And I looked at it and realized that while 30 / 5 is 6, 3 / 5 is .6 and it's the same damned operation. I could have easily scaled that up a factor of 10 in my head, but scaling it down in that intuitive way never quite dawned on me.
I can see all the different calculations that come down to the same operation, and I can look up and down the length of the slipstick and visually see so many other ratios that have the same relationship up and down the scale. It's just this elegantly simple and brilliantly beautiful tool that reinforces numeracy by visualizing something that can be really hard to visualize. It's a wonder.
(It's also kind of silly that I've been using this icon of me holding a slide rule for five or six years and have never *really* sat down to figure out how to use the thing....)
I can see all the different calculations that come down to the same operation, and I can look up and down the length of the slipstick and visually see so many other ratios that have the same relationship up and down the scale. It's just this elegantly simple and brilliantly beautiful tool that reinforces numeracy by visualizing something that can be really hard to visualize. It's a wonder.
(It's also kind of silly that I've been using this icon of me holding a slide rule for five or six years and have never *really* sat down to figure out how to use the thing....)
