Lockheed Martin puts out a Fusion Related Press Release

Iannis_sl said:

Sorry guys but tad is right about that one. I'm not good at math, I'm bad at it in fact. Given this fact it is still shocking to me how much worse at it people who are about ten years younger are. Putting calculators in the classroom forces the teachers to be lazy.

We're not talking about complex advanced concepts. We're talking about the basic ability to subtract or divide, or even understand what a fraction is and how it works. Then you have common core bullshit making it even worse.

Click to expand...

Last derail on this. But if you want your eyes to bleed for a reason other than Ebola here's a link to a Texas High School Slide Rule Competitive Mathematics Test from the early 70s. Early problems could probably be solved as quickly or quicker with a calculator than a slide rule but by problem 16 (if not earlier) the kids who really knew how to use their slide rules would be faster than your TI scientific calculator for most problems and by mid-test a 1971 kid with slide rule would be smoking the 2014 kid or adult with a calculator.

http://www.mikeyancey.com/files/Slid...ests/SR107.pdf

TL; DR Medium Prob and Hard Prob

What exactly are you arguing for Tad? Going back to spending time teaching people how to use slide rules over calculators? What are your feelings on the abacus?

khalid_sl said:

What exactly are you arguing for Tad? Going back to spending time teaching people how to use slide rules over calculators? What are your feelings on the abacus?

Click to expand...

I said I wouldn't derail the thread again - but since you asked:

Abacus is fine too. Still big in China, which seems to be doing okay in the math department. Nobody should be using calculators or CAS to learn math - slide rules, log tables, abacus, pen & paper: all good. Calculator, graphing calculator, CAS: bad.

Re-railing: the point being one reason we're not making the scientific progress towards fusion that we should be is that we're not producing enough scientists and engineers and a big reason for that is we have been teaching math wrong ever since the introduction of cheap calculators.

At the end of the day the average person is rationally lazy and will use the easiest, fastest way to accomplish something. I find math hard as do 99% of the population and the only way to learn something that is hard is skull sweat - calculators removed a lot of the skull sweat and has resulted in a lot mathematically illiterate adults.

Also Common Core is fucking retarded.

http://www.ixl.com/math/grade-3/lattice-multiplication

Common core is shit, but you think we are gonna inspire the next generation to make more engineers and scientists by taking calculators out of the class room? That's a pipe dream.

That's a good idea up until high school, but you really expect kids to do logs, exponents, long division, quadratic formula, etc....by long hand? So they could maybe get through 3 problems during a one hour test. Brilliant.

tad10_sl said:

Re-railing: the point being one reason we're not making the scientific progress towards fusion that we should be is that we're not producing enough scientists and engineers and a big reason for that is we have been teaching math wrong ever since the introduction of cheap calculators.

Click to expand...

The reason we aren't making more scientific progress towards fusion is that fusion is a really hard problem.

Literally the easiest part of mathematics is doing rote calculations, which is the only thing the slide rule is going to help you with. Calculators (and computers) remove the tedium of mathematics and make computations possible that people couldn't dream of years ago. I would be hard pressed to think of something less useful for a student atm than doing rote calculations with a slide rule instead of learning how to solve those problems with a computer. You can teach square roots and logarithms without a slide rule, its absolutely silly to say you need that in order to give them an understanding of it.

tad.

You just made the same argument against calculators that I've seen you make against instanced raids.

khalid_sl said:

Literally the easiest part of mathematics is doing rote calculations, which is the only thing the slide rule is going to help you with.

Click to expand...

Nope. Slide rules force you to learn about orders of magnitude are the best way to learn logarithms/introduce students to isomorphisms - let me elaborate: most people learn better visually and you actually see the translation in front of you when you are using your slide rule to multiply 557 x 1456. You do understand that the basic scales on a slide rule (C/D/CI/Etc) are laid out logarithmically? That's how they work. Slide rules give you a facility with numbers that calculators don't.

Let me elaborate again: on the front side of my Versalog II if I set my hairline to 4 on the D scale I have immediately: 1/4 (CI) Cube of 4 (K), Square of 4 (A), Root of 4(R1), 2/3 Root of the Cube of 4 (K/A) 3/2 Power of the Square of 4 (A/K) (not to mention e to .004 and e -.004 and 4pi 1/4pi). Seeing these relationships and working with numbers in this visual way is a fuckton better than a graphing calculator where you put in numbers and it thinks for you.

khalid_sl said:

You can teach square roots and logarithms without a slide rule, its absolutely silly to say you need that in order to give them an understanding of it.

Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure you don't work with students. The mathematical illiteracy of the average high school and college student would astound you.

The reason we aren't making more scientific progress towards fusion is that fusion is a really hard problem.

Click to expand...

You know what else were hard problems? Atomic Fission and Landing on the Moon. The maths for both were done mostly with slide rules and blackboards.

-------------------------------

TL;DR you don't know what the fuck you are talking about if you think the average student is learning math properly today and if you think the problem with fusion is "It's hard" and not "we are fucking up teaching our kids math and science"

Quaid_sl said:

tad.

You just made the same argument against calculators that I've seen you make against instanced raids.

Click to expand...

Funnily enough my first response to Khalid initially mentioned that - that people are rationally lazy in MMOs as well. But I cut it, and I'm glad I did, or I wouldn't have seen the mind blown jpg.

@Beagle You can do all that with slide rules - that's how the cool kids did it in the 1960s. Look at the spoilered image - back side tan/sin/cos trig functions and both degree and radian measure (SRT scale Black marks are radians) as well as exp function up to e^10. If people want scientific breakthroughs we have to do better at producing scientists in this country and that starts with re-introducing skull sweat to math. But in a fun way - frankly slide rules are also a lot more fun than your average scientific calculator.

I don't think it will happen we'll just get Common Core 2.0 and more mathematically illiterate students, but that doesn't mean that I shouldn't tilt at that windmill.

We won WWII with B-52 bombers, Sherman tanks, and M1 Garands, and lost Vietnam with M-16s, helicopters, and jet fighters. Obviously if we would have fought Vietnam using WWII era implements we would have been successful. Tad logic.

tad10_sl said:

I'm pretty sure you don't work with students. The mathematical illiteracy of the average high school and college student would astound you.

Click to expand...

I'm a mathematics professor dipshit. You are right, the average college student is pretty bad at math. Having them spend time learning the slide rule sure as fuck isn't going to fix it.

We have a lot of fucking problems with getting kids into, and being successful at, both science and math. Replacing calculators with slide rules is about 134th on the list of things that need to be done to address that.

khalid_sl said:

The reason we aren't making more scientific progress towards fusion is that fusion is a really hard problem.

Literally the easiest part of mathematics is doing rote calculations, which is the only thing the slide rule is going to help you with. Calculators (and computers) remove the tedium of mathematics and make computations possible that people couldn't dream of years ago. I would be hard pressed to think of something less useful for a student atm than doing rote calculations with a slide rule instead of learning how to solve those problems with a computer. You can teach square roots and logarithms without a slide rule, its absolutely silly to say you need that in order to give them an understanding of it.

Click to expand...

Which is kind of a problem when they literally can't do it.

I dunno that bringing slide rules back would fix that. I'm fairly sure it wouldn't. But it's better to have them do those 3 problems by hand and think about the numbers they're manipulating while they're learning than to teach them how to play a test like a game. The question seems to becoming more and more "Can you push buttons on a calculator in the right order?" rather than "What is the right order to push these buttons in?". Which might be a subtle difference, but it is a crippling one when people who, honestly, are otherwise fairly intelligent get flummoxed dealing with arbitrary division or subtraction.

Addition and multiplication are easier and seem less problematic.

TheBeagle_sl said:

We won WWII with B-52 bombers, Sherman tanks, and M1 Garands, and lost Vietnam with M-16s, helicopters, and jet fighters. Obviously if we would have fought Vietnam using WWII era implements we would have been successful. Tad logic.

Click to expand...

If we had fought North Vietnam using WWII philosophy of war we would have won: regardless of whether we used WWII era weapons or Vietnam era weapons.

You know what else were hard problems? Atomic Fission and Landing on the Moon. The maths for both were done mostly with slide rules and blackboards.

Click to expand...

They used those because the computers at the time were massive pieces of shit, the massive part being literal.

tad10_sl said:

If we had fought North Vietnam using WWII philosophy of war we would have won: regardless of whether we used WWII era weapons or Vietnam era weapons.

Click to expand...

Ahh, so the problem isn't in the tools we use, but how we use them and the problem really lies in our "philosophy" or more appropriately, culture. Couldn't agree more Tad.

Ever noticed how in 1971 scientists were looked up to and glorified by society a lot more and we as a country took pride in our strong public education system? There weren't too many home schoolers back then.

Iannis_sl said:

Which is kind of a problem when they literally can't do it.

I dunno that bringing slide rules back would fix that. I'm fairly sure it wouldn't. But it's better to have them do those 3 problems by hand and think about the numbers they're manipulating while they're learning than to teach them how to play a test like a game. The question seems to becoming more and more "Can you push buttons on a calculator in the right order?" rather than "What is the right order to push these buttons in?". Which might be a subtle difference, but it is a crippling one when people who, honestly, are otherwise fairly intelligent get flummoxed dealing with arbitrary division or subtraction.

Addition and multiplication are easier and seem less problematic.

Click to expand...

At this point kids are getting scared off math - the reason why I push slide rules is that you can give a kid a basic 6 or 7 scale Darmstadt (or simpler) slide rule and tell him (or her) that he can calculate anything. Take your calculator most blow up after 1^99 or 1^-99- doesn't happen with a slide rule ;-) This is a subtle point but an important one for kids learning math. No number is out of bounds with a slide rule. Facility with a slide rule is a weapon against innumeracy (to continue the MMO isomorphism).

A very good virtual slide rule: Pickett rules are noted for having Ln scale on the slider (reverse side from default unfortunately unlike a real rule you can flip the slider) which has a lot of interesting and powerful abilities uncommon in slide rules.


Basically I think you should all go to ebay and pick up a Versalog or a Pickett. Download some instruction manuals. Learn how to use it and then come back to this discussion. I don't think enough of you (I'm looking at your Beagle) get exactly how powerful slide rules are.

Virtual Pickett N3-T Slide Rule

fanaskin_sl said:

You could also easily get a job in actual science in said field at the time, nowadays alot of stem people are bled into finance sector.

Click to expand...

Goes right back to what we value as a society. All the slide rules in the world aren't gonna stop dumbass kids from glorifying talent show singers and celebutards. Dumbass kids grow up to be dumbass adults who shit out more dumbass kids and one day you wake up to find yourself living in an Idiocracy surrounded by dumbasses.