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To: python-list@python.org
From: Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: Significant digits in a float?
Date: Thu, 01 May 2014 21:47:16 -0400
Organization: IISS Elusive Unicorn
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On Wed, 30 Apr 2014 22:54:21 -0500, Mark H Harris <harrismh777@gmail.com>
declaimed the following:

>
>    My high school '74 was the last class to learn the slide-rule using 
>the Sterling (we paid a deposit to use the school's). I returned my 
>Sterling to the teacher at year-end and got my deposit back. They are 
>all probably in an old card-board box in the basement. I should ask.
>
	Since calculators had started to appear, I never did get formal
training in slide-rules. The LL scales still require me to glance at a
guide book...

>    I received my Pickett Model N4-T Vector-Type Log Log Dual-Base Speed 
>Rule as a graduation | birthday gift... off to college with a leather 
>cased slip stick hanging from my belt (I was invincable).  Mine had the 

	Strangely, out of the three Picketts I now own, only the CIE had the
belt hook included.

>CF/m DF/m scales also -- folded at 2.3, the loge of 10 with ? where it 
>should be (more or less).  Copyright 1959... that baby was the king of 

	Interesting -- I've not encountered those scales.
>
>    I carried my slide rule to my general class exam as well. The VE 
>inspected it to be sure that certain stuff was not written in pencil 
>between the scales! True story. Its not required today, of course, but I 
>can still send/receive at 20 wpm. <sigh>
>
	Whereas I started as a "no-good" Tech. It was the dropping of the code
requirement that encouraged me to try for the higher ratings. After all,
using a TS-570 just for 6m is rather limiting <G> [and even that was
difficult -- for a few months I had a mass PVC piping straddling a fence
supporting a pair of 6m HamSticks as a dipole... Until the apartment
manager complained.

	Many moons ago, I could take Gregg shorthand at 100WPM <G> [but my
typing speed was only a slow 30WPM]


	I regret that I never risked the $35 dollars when my college bookstore
was closing out the slide-rule display. They had the top Post bamboo
laminate rule at half price. At the time I'd bought an HP-25 calculator
[they phased out the HP brand a year or two later -- apparently RPN was too
confusing].

	And, in a side comment, I once corrected a bookstore that had filed
Asimov's "Easy Introduction to the Slide Rule" under Science Fiction.
-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/