On the Soapbox

The May 2006 issue of the Scientific American has an interesting piece on the history of the slide rule. At least, it was interesting for me because up to this point, I hadn't the faintest idea how a slide rule worked or how one might actually use a slide rule.

Invented a long time ago in the 1600's, the slide rule is surprisingly simple in concept: it basically uses the cool properties of logarithms to reduce "hard" problems like division and roots into simple addition and subtraction arithmetic. The article even had a cut-out do-it-yourself slide rule to practice with, though I was not quite ready to mutilate my copy. :P

Although there is no doubt that computers (and digital calculators in particular, although I do so much calculation on my general computer these days that I haven't touched my calculator in years) are much faster, efficient, precise, and capable, the article does bring up a good point: there was something valuable in this lost art. How many people today are familiar with logs, much less the properties of logs? And with the ease of number crunching today, gone is the incentive to spend time thinking about a problem in order to find clever shortcuts and simplifications. I suppose something analogous in computing is that software has grown increasingly inefficient as processing power increases because more and more programmers no longer bother to really think about the logic and then see and take the most efficient solutions (something that I am sometimes guilty of as well, especially with my older projects). Or in economics, this is analogous to the recent study that showed that modern economists are now so far removed from the basic principles of economists that the vast majority of them cannot even correctly answer a simple introductory-level opportunity cost problem.

Of course, this is not to say that I am going to go buy a slide rule tomorrow and dump my many computers; I am by no means a Luddite, and in the greater scheme of things, the death of the slide rule has been a hugely positive thing. But it is interesting in a fascinating sort of way to look at and think about the unintended effects of such progress.