My studio had a very hilarious White Elephant gift exchange today. I was lucky to get one of the hottests gifts - a slide rule! I became fascinated with this mysterious and cool-looking gadget, wondering how it works. Looks very complicated to me. It is the ancestor of today's electronic calculator.
I later found out it was from Fred, a principal of NBBJ, who sits next to me :) He used that in college, which was 40 years ago! The rule is still in good shape. To me, it is a very precious gift from an older generation, seeing how drastically architects' work style has changed due to the advancing technology.
2 comments:
so it can not be avoided getting deeper research into understanding the functional parts, finding out how it works, and that really helps. I hate even the simpliest propotional rules b/c i am bad at translating the actual numbers to the propotional ones...soomeday you have to teach how to do that simple and fast!..wel, enjoy playing with the rule, pullig it back and forth:), if you can not use it very well:P, hehe...
it might be interesting to compare silde rule with the Chinese 'Suan Pan' to see the different way of thinking across cultures.
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