GUYS I HAVE PURCHASED A SLIDE RULE

Story: Okay, so it’s been like four days since I’ve gone walking, which is four days too many, so I decided to walk down to Chinook Centre (about 13 miles round trip). However, once I got down there, I changed my mind and decided to check out the Value Village close to the mall instead. I was just going to look around since I have practically no money at the moment, but when I was digging through the miscellaneous baskets on one of the shelves I came upon THIS:

And since it was only $2, I had to get it. So I did.

It didn’t have a manual or anything with it and I’ve never used a slide rule before in my life, so I went to teh internetz to see if I could figure out how it works. And it’s super cool! Let me show you a few basic things.

Multiplication: Say I wanted to multiply 1.2 by 3. What I’d do is find 1.2 on the “D” scale and slide my “C” scale so that its 1 is right above 1.2.

Then I would find 3 on my “C” scale. Whatever number on the “D” scale is right below the 3 on the “C” scale is the product of 1.2 times 3: 3.6!

Division: Let’s do 6 divided by 4. You take the divisor, 4, on the “C” scale and set it above the dividend, 6, on the “D” scale like so:

The quotient is whatever number is on the “D” scale right below the 1 on the “C” scale: 1.5!

Finding a square root: Say I wanted to find the square root of 5. I would find  5 on the “A” scale. Whatever number on the “D” scale that is below that 5 is the square root: approximately 2.23!

Super cool. You can also do things like cubes/cube roots, proportions, logarithms, and sines and tangents of angles, but I’m still learning.

WOO!