Hi John,
I remember reading this same excerpt in Waugh with a smile and blurting
out "BUY A COMPUTER"! Of course this isn't entirely fair, since at the
time of the publication PC's (TRS-80, Apple II, CPM "boxes", ect...)
were just starting to get popular. It reminds me though of a physics
book I read as a teenager, that was published around the
turn-of-the-century, and that claimed "no machine will ever be created
that can play a game of chess". Oh really...
-Luke
John Carmichael wrote:
>
> Eureka! The formula! I remembered the endearing little story Waugh told
> about laying out tacks on his floor every day for a year to get his
> analemma, rather than doing the tedious computations, but I didn't remember
> that he gave a formula.
