My first calculator was a Bowmar Brain 4 function. My freshman year in college was the last year that engineering school had a slide rule use class. A couple years later my older brother gave me his nice HP. 20 years later solar powered multi function calculators were free gifts for signing up for just about anything. I think we are on the same trajectory with Android tablets.

Knowing a bit of statistics can be extremely helpful if you are having to sort out ORIGINAL data that may or may not have been faked. The key is in distribution of digits. It's a bit more complicated than this example, but if you ask someone to produce "random" numbers he'll more than likely favor odd numbers over even numbers. The "data" he's provided is predominated with odd numbers? He faked it!

Of course if all you see is the "results" and are stonewalled when you ask to see the original [climate] data, unadjusted, you have a different variety of fake data.

There are other techniques I won't reveal here.

Electro luminescent slipped in there for a short time too. However the power savings for LCD and the extended battery life it granted caused that technology to more or less own the market

Rule 13. Omit needless words.

I do. My father still has his ivory one, mine is plastic :(

I still use my HP15C from my plebe year 30 years ago. At one point, I lost the cover for the battery compartment. I called an HP support number to see where I could buy one. I told him how long I'd had the calculator and the guy asked for my address and sent me one in a small envelope.

For decades I thought RPN was just an ethnic joke. Then, I found my old manual for the calculator in an old box of books and, looking through it, found out that it was indeed the name. LOL.

I have mentioned before that although my freshman year was 1967, I went back and completed my degrees 2005-2010. I had credit for a semester of calculus, but not algebra. I took the class without a book and without a calculator and got an A. On one test, I had to settle for partial credit for one problem. We had a linear regression with ten points and I only finished three by hand.

My saving grace was Cleveland Public Schools. I had ten semesters of math in four years (counting summer school). I was actually in Calculus One when I got kicked out as a discipline problem and went to another school. I could not get into their calculus class, so I took another semester of "senior math", with probability and stuff.

My wife and I both can outrace the cashier. Again in CPS, in junior high, for three semesters, we had six weeks of "mental math" learning to estimate, borrow, carry, etc., in our heads. I picked up a few more tricks from Feynman's stories. Also, oddly enough, it was computer programming that put the icing on the cake. It was an easy lesson that you can guess almost anything by taking half the correction three times.

I know what a nixie tube is, but must admit, I have not seen a calculator using them. There are some cool kits to make clocks from them. Russia still makes the tubes.

I am also irritated by this TI programmable calculator bias/requirement my son had. First I don't see the need for programmable calculators in high school classes. It is an unnecessary skill, and the calculator-specific semantics of it will be 1) obsolete and 2) forgotten in two years.

yea, what's up with that? as long as you know how to use it...seems a little monopolistic to me

I wish I could have seen that!

While in undergraduate Mech Eng, my small class drew a terrible Polish professor for Machine Design who was killing us by just reading the book in class. We all loved another fantastic professor who would start a class talking hot rods, and 30 min later you realized that had become the lecture. One evening at ~2am, we couldn't take it anymore, so we made an effigy from a T-square and old TI-calculator rewired to flash in a demonic manner with its circuit boards all broken in a technical disembowelment. We broke in to the professors office row, and left it with a note appealing to him to use his god-like powers to save us.
For what it is worth, that Polish guy was later let go, thank goodness.

I don't have my own story, but my contractor told me this. He figured the price of jobs out in his head, so he gets a calculator...what kind..no idea. Anyway, figures this job out and he must have hit a wrong button because the bid was $2500.00 different than the material on the job....so he smashed it with his hammer and still to this day, uses his brain.

Dated now, just like me. All so true!

WRT actually reading. I overstated, perhaps could say I looked at every page.

I have become a fan of correlation analyses to identify our businesses (my group manages nine) financial methods that are different. Try to find the "fat" overhead in a company that is playing "hide the pea" sometime. It is a lot harder than you think, but sum all the overheads, divide by revenue, and correlate several businesses, and voila, lazy-chubby pops right out like superheterodyne pulling noise out of the floor.

LOL!

happy belated birthday herb!

My date of birth is 7-7-34.
I've used it hundreds of times but only recently, someone pointed out that when those numbers are put into a calculator and the calculator is turned upside down, it spells hell. I'm not sure of the significance if there is any.

...but at least you have a portable calculator called your brain.
Today, children graduating college (let alone high school) can't do simple addition/subtraction in their heads.