Thus it was written in the epistle of Steve Dirickson,
>
> >    But does anyone else have a 'circular slide rule'?  Yep...  I got one at
> > a rummage sale decades ago for the math and physics formulas that are on it
> > as well as the periodic table that is on the back of it!!
>
> Ugh. We tried those for a while, but the constant wrist-twisting was a
> killer (hmmm--maybe the precursor to carpal-tunnel-like RSIs?) Yeah, they
> could get more info into a smaller space (the outer rings of a 4-inch
> diameter circ were longer than a 12-inch stick), but they were too hard to
> manipulate quickly.

That's interesting.  I had found the circular one frustrating and gone back to
my others, but I had chalked it up to lack of familiarity--I'm more used to
the linear type.  I know that the idea was to solve the problem of running off
the end of the rule, but with some forethought, one could generally avoid that
anyway and I felt like the constant readjustment necessary on the circular
rule slowed me down.

Ted
--
Ted Ashton ([log in to unmask]), Info Sys, Southern Adventist University
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I remember one occasion when I tried to add a little seasoning to a review,
but I wasn't allowed to. The paper was by Dorothy Maharam, and it was a
perfectly sound contribution to abstract measure theory. The domains of the
underlying measures were not sets but elements of more general Boolean
algebras, and their range consisted not of positive numbers but of certain
abstract equivalence classes. My proposed first sentence was: "The author
discusses valueless measures in pointless spaces."
                        -- Halmos, Paul R.
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         Deep thoughts to be found at http://www.southern.edu/~ashted