My grandmother's life started before automobiles, and ended after we put a man on the moon. Cars, planes, jet planes, rockets, computers, radio, television, were all brand new to her. She was almost 40 when women got the vote in the US, and slavery was outlawed here just 20 years before her birth. It's a matter of perspective, but I think that we can say that no generation saw more dramatic change before hers, and perhaps no generation will see more dramatic change after hers. (Alvin Toffler might not agree.)
But last night, as I looked over the shoulder of my son doing his physics homework (which he submits on line) it struck me that the way in which he calculates things would have struck me as almost absurd in my slide rule days.
My son Stephen uses Google as a calculator. One advantage (over his amazing graphing calculator) is that Google keeps track of the units, so when he knows he's looking for joules and he gets fig newtons, he knows he did something wrong. He is amazingly fast with a keyboard (learned mainly from online gaming) and understands the math and physics concepts well, but he is a little sloppy, and might go through five or six iterations of a calculation before he gets it right. The calculation is right there on the Google entry line, so he just edits the line to move a couple parentheses, and in a couple seconds he has his answer. I'll occasionally do a units conversion in Google, but it never really occurred to me to use it routinely (I do spreadsheets, or use the scientific calculator built into Windows). I'd guess that Stephen can have an answer (even with a few iterations), in about the time it takes me to think about what formula might apply.
Suppose that you, like me, are a little dim-witted when it comes to appropriate use of units. And suppose you're thinking about a weight loss business in which you take your clients up into space to solve their weight "problem." How about 4000 miles up (or 8000 miles from the Earth's center: If you haven't used the Google calculator, try typing this in: G*(6e24 kg)/(8000 miles)^2 (Mixed units… who cares! Constants? Google knows plenty of them.) When you hit enter, Google will show you that your clients will weigh about a quarter of their weight on earth. You should get a lot of clients, right? (Having written this, I'm thinking this might not make sense to my brethren and sistern around the world, where people have mass instead of weight. For us English units types, slugs seems like an insult, I guess.)
So here is the absurd part: The calculation is pretty straightforward, and could be handled by any calculator, even a four banger, if you know (or look up) the G constant. But to do this calculation via Google, you are using your high-powered PC, which could do a gazillion calculations like this in a second. Not only that, but you are using it as a virtually dumb terminal. Perhaps thousands of miles away, what you've typed into the search line is parsed in some other computer. That computer has to ask, "Is this guy (or gal) looking for a text string, or does he want a calculation performed?" Having decided, then the calculation itself may be performed in that computer… or maybe yet another. The answer might take a circuitous route to get back to you, involving various switches and routers, modulators, demodulators, thousands of miles of cables, etc. etc.
Had someone told me, back in my college days, that my future son would be using perhaps $millions in (shared) computing hardware to do a calculation I could do on my slide rule, I would have fallen off my chair. It may seem a bit inefficient, but on the other hand it seems way kewl.
The Million Dollar Slide Rule
Re: The Million Dollar Slide Rule
_E2685E7D-E192-4CE3-059F95EECACC7484.gif "STL Engineer's Picture"){kind=avatar}
