I wrote: Despite rapid improvements wind and solar are still cheaper than fossil > fuel, so they will go bankrupt before fossil fuel does. >
I mean they are still nominally *more expensive* than fossil fuel, because we do not take into account the cost of pollution or global warming. Terry Blanton <[email protected]> wrote: I have a bamboo Post Versalog leather cased slide rule in my office. > Our intern engineers do not know what it is or what to believe when I > tell them that it was the calculator that took us to the moon. > > I make them read the instruction book and do some simple calculations > with the rule out of spite for their youth! Ha, ha! My mother said that slide rules are good for students because they force you to pay attention to what you are doing. You have to remember where the decimal point is. She and others of her generation felt that two decimal places of precision was enough for most purposes. They thought that modern calculators with all those extra digits give people the wrong idea. People tend to go for highly precise looking numbers that mean nothing. On the other hand, I read an article somewhere recently that said that civil engineering projects such as bridges and even aircraft designed with slide rules tended to be overengineered. They were stronger than they needed to be, and used more material, because the calculations were not precise. They did have more precise means of computation. My mother was an expert at using a Comptometer, which she did during WWII. - Jed
