Discussion Groups / English Usage / July 2009

I can affirm the "desk" part; the remainder is beyond my ken or
remembery. If you mean by "monitor", some kind of electronic display,
no; all electrically powered machinery with numbers on wheels, it
seemed.

The row of machines in what we called the "statistics lab" were large
and had columns and rows of spinning numbers. Someone practiced and
experimented so he could make all the whirrings and thumpings produce
waltz tempos, marches, and a Latin rhythm of some kind. All I ever got
to was posing a division problem (or was it multiplication) that
yielded a product 1234567 ... end.

My high school had a couple of those, acquired around that date.

Darned well taught me what a stack was, they did.

No, a slide rule really is what it takes.
See the illustration in
<http://www.ansible.co.uk/sfx/sfx129.html>
for proof,

Jan

Evan  wrote  on Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:34:24 -0700:

There were handheld mechanical calculators in the 50s. I remember one
called a Curta (spelling in doubt) that would even fit in a pocket but
was rather heavy, A Google image search on Curta calculator will bring
up pictures.

The first one spotted during my undergraduate career at MIT was owned by a
freshman in 1972 whose grandmother owned a large chunk of a Fortune 100
company.  Just four functions, and priced so that if you needed to ask you
couldn't afford one.

By the time I graduated a few years later, the HP 25C (continuous memory!
wowie!) had become the tool of choice for students who needed to do
calculations, and the Coop had stopped selling slide rules.

The scientific calculator in the library was a Wang desktop-sized model.

And the Sinclair Cambridge must have appeared in about '74, because I
vaguely think I must have got my Dixon's knock-off in '75 or '76 (for
£7, was it?).

The Curtas were heavily advertised in magazines like Scientific
American.

Mark Brader:

(Repeating an old posting of mine from another newsgroup.  The original
context, the "this" in the first sentence, was discussion of an airliner
being glided to a landing after all engines failed.)

The most famous case of this has to be that of Air Canada flight 143
on 1983-07-23.  Due to a series of errors[1] the plane ran out of
fuel at cruising altitude.  Unfortunately, the book I'm consulting
for details[2] is written with more attention to sensationalism[3]
than to straightforward presentation, and some of the numbers presented
don't make sense in conjunction with each other[4].

In any case, the pilot first tried to divert to Winnipeg, then as it
became clear that this wouldn't work, turned to the small town of Gimli
where an abandoned air base was still in use as a general aviation
airport[5], and landed there more or less safely[6].  The total glide
was at least 45 miles and maybe as much as 80 miles, depending on how
the book is interpretd.  And at the end, the pilot had altitude to
spare and sideslipped the plane to lose it.  Not all that much like
a rock!  (Now if you were talking about the Space Shuttle...)

As well as the main generators on the engines, the plane included an
"auxiliary power unit" which burned its own fuel from the main supply,
but this was useless since there was no fuel.  However, it was also
provided with a "ram air turbine" which could be lowered from one
of the wings -- basically a windmill, a 4-foot ducted propeller
powered by the plane's motion relative to the air.  This is what
they depended on for electrical power, and limited hydraulic power,
for the unpowered descent.  (It couldn't operate some components such
as the flaps, though.)

The pilot, Bob Pearson, was initially disciplined for mistake 2, but
a subsequent inquiry felt that blame was so widely divisible that he
was more to be praised for avoiding a disaster.

[1] The plane's fuel monitoring was dependent on two communication
channels.  If one failed, the other would take over automatically.
Due to a badly soldered joint, one channel failed *partially* and this
was not sufficient for the other to kick in.  So the fuel gauges were
inoperative unless the bad channel was disabled at the circuit breaker.
One mechanic identified the symptom, opened the breaker, and left
it marked "inop(erative)".  Another mechanic, trying to diagnose the
actual problem, closed the breaker again.  He didn't locate it and,
since his tests showed the other channel was working, he naturally
assumed the gauges would work from it and didn't trouble to reopen
the breaker: mistake 1.

It was permissible to fly with only one channel in the system working,
so the mechanics declared the plane usable.  It was not permissible
to fly without gauges working, so the pilot declared it unusable.
However, when informed that the mechanics had declared it usable, he
believed them.  Mistake 2.  Note that the aircraft did include a fuel
computer which, if told initially how much fuel was in the tanks, could
report how much should be left, even with no actual gauges working.

The tanks then had to be fueled to a known quantity, which was
measured by volume.  However, the mass of the fuel is what really
matters, and since the density varies by temperature, a conversion
is required.  The plane was a Boeing 767, the first model used by
Air Canada where the mass is measured in kilograms[7].  The ground
crew inadvertently supplied a density figure in pounds per liter,
and as everyone was still more used to this, they failed to notice.
(The habit of speaking in pure numbers without units must have been
a contributing factor.)  Everyone trusted the calculcations, and
the plane set out with 21,700 pounds of fuel instead of 21,700 kg.
Mistake 3.

[2] "Freefall" by William Hoffer and Marilyn Mona Hoffer (1989,
St. Martin's Press, New York, ISBN 0-312-02919-5).

[3] Examples: "Looking around, she realized there were no atheists on
Flight 143."  And: "It began to oscillate, shaking and bouncing and
rattling.  He braced himself for the moment of impact, and his silent,
lonely prayer continued.  Oh my God, please help me, please help me.
Get me through this, God, please God, no."

[4] They say the initial indication of a problem was at 41,000 feet
and 120+ miles from Winnipeg, whereupon the pilot turned for Winnipeg
almost immediately; and that the fuel actually ran out at 28,000 feet,
still 100+ miles from Winnipeg; and that "anxious seconds later"
(but several chapters away in the back-and-forth presentation of
the book) they were at 22,000 feet, and apparently at the same time,
65 miles from Winnipeg and 45 from Gimli.  Later they are at 9,400
feet and 39 miles from Winnipeg, and can be projected to fall 10-12
miles short.  They then divert in a 180 degree right turn to Gimli,
then 12 miles away.  These numbers do not go together.

[5] Unfortunately, the air base had had two parallel runways, only one
of which was still in use.  The pilot misunderstood the landmarks and
landed on the wrong runway, which had been converted to a racetrack
and now, the racing day being over, had children cycling on it and
families barbecuing nearby!  Fortunately, everyone who needed to get
out of the way did so.

[6] When the landing gear was lowered by gravity, the nose wheel didn't
lock, and there wasn't time to do anything about it.  The nose dragged
along the strip and started a small fire.  The aircraft was evacuated
through the slides, but this was difficult because the tail was too
high, and some injuries resulted.

[7] Some would add the fact of conversion to the list of mistakes.

Added in reposting: in 1995 there was a TV-movie about the incident.
Many identifying details were changed, including the flight number,
which they then proceeded to use in the title: "Falling from the Sky:
Flight 174", also known as just "Flight 174".)

A friend of my wife's, call her Pat Smith, has been in hospital many
times over the past few years.  Recently she needed a scan of some
kind and was prepped, but the scan never happened.  The consultant
came round, told her that her results looked good and was astonished
when she told him she was still waiting.  It transpired that there was
another Pat Smith on the ward, more or less her age and general
description, in hospital for something else entirely.  Just imagine
what might have happened if it had been a major operation rather than
a scan.

For that matter, temperature isn't metric (nor Imperial)

Robin Bignall:

Evan Kirshenbaum:

The rulers I first used as a schoolchild in the 1960s in Canada were
marked in inches and centimeters, and today this is still common
but not universal.  I happen to have two tape measures right here;
one of them is one that I bought, probably in the 1980s or early 1990s,
and is also marked in both systems; but I remember that not all of the
ones in the store were.  I haven't looked in recent years to see if
things have changed.

Incidentally, on the outside the length of this tape measure is marked
as "26'/8m" [sic, no space], but it actually has no markings in feet
or meters, just inches and centimeters.  The inch scale ends at 312,
which aligns with 792.5 cm on the other scale.  The absence of "feet"
markings is actually a bit annoying for longer measurements, where feet
are likely to provide sufficient accuracy and I'd rather see "23 feet"
than "276 inches".  Metric is easier in this respect, of course.

(The other tape measure is the same brand and has the same style of
markings.)

Absolutely standard in the UK.  I'd be really surprised to find one that
didn't have either.

Sometimes, if I just need to remember and transfer measurements from
one thing to another, I'll use whichever scale they hit the tidiest
value on, or whichever way round is easiest to line up.

Completely normal in Canada and has been since, I believe, the
1960's.  I don't think we have the dual speedometer numbering that we
used to have, though.

John Kane Kingston ON Canada

America just has to go metric.
Nowadays the American kiddies have become to dumb
to do all the sums needed for all those conversions.
(don't blame me, not my joke, it's a quote)

The Amazing Grace always carried her nanosecond with her.
She had a sailor carrying the microsecond (spooled),
and some picosecond dust.
,

Certainly not.
They are common in thoroughly metricated countries as well.
(I have several of them)

Jan